1. Posts must be related to the discussion of digital piracy
2. Don't request invites, trade, sell, or self-promote
3. Don't request or link to specific pirated titles, including DMs
4. Don't submit low-quality posts, be entitled, or harass others
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Filesharing isn't piracy. It's filesharing.
Piracy is when you attack a ship and steal its cargo.
But, of course, it was difficult for the RIAA to have a war on sharing, so they had to use a different term with sinister connotations and implant it into the public consciousness.
And it worked! You never hear anybody talk about "filesharing" anymore.
The copyright holder is only actually harmed if I would have paid them otherwise. Since I never would have paid for the movie nothing changes for them. Nothing is stollen because they would have no idea someone had a copy unless they check.
Real pirates steal stuff. So-called digital "piracy" isn't piracy at all. This is just propaganda for the business model that the establishment is trying to hold onto.
It doesn't hurt IP holders to "pirate" their data. It is no difference to them whether you were to pirate it or to have never been born at all in the first place. Their profit is the exact same either way. Their business model is imaginary and they want to force it on everyone else.
To be more precise: it is actually beneficial for big corporations if you pirate their media, as opposed to you having never been born. The sole act of you 'consuming' their media is positive for them, since you'll almost definitely see their logos (advertising to you), and you may spread the word to people who may pay for it (advertising by you).
As you said, it's all pretty much propaganda to brainwash us into trying to be 'good citizens' (obedient consumers).
These days (at least in my country) I can't own movies, games and watch or play them at my will
Companies like Netflix, Amazon are lending movies but not making them free for you. And then they wonder why piracy is rising
Tbh for a student like me, piracy is the only option. If buying isn't owning then piracy isn't stealing
The only damage that exists from piracy is to the copyright holders profits.....
Since the copyright holder is usually a corporation that is owned by shareholders, the majority of which are richer than all of us combined, ask me if I give a shit and I will show you my field of shits to give, and you will see that it is barren.
Eat the rich. Or Luigi them... I don't care.
I just got reminded of that sick anti piracy ad that would play before every film back in the 2000s lol
YoU WoUlDn'T dOwNlOaD A Car!?!?!
You're damn right I would; get me a 3D printer big enough...
The music and editing of that ad were lowkey fire. The message... got burnt in that same fire :)
They didnโt license the font that they usedโฆ
They were hit by a lawsuit for the music too.
I don't even call it piracy, because piracy has a definition that this doesn't meet. I call it what it is: unauthorized reproduction. That's it. That's all "piracy" is, it's literally just unauthorized reproduction. Doesn't sound nearly as scary and dramatic when you call it what it actual is, does it?
Piracy is when you board a ship, kill or kidnap its crew and steal the cargo. Copying a file is nothing like that.
I wouldnt download a car, but that's only because im fanatically anti car.
Because cars are bad. There should not be cars.
Disclosure: I have been sailing the seas for years, but...
This logic does no justice to the objective financial harm being done to the creators/owners of valuable data/content/media.
The original creator/owner is at a loss when data is copied. The intent of that data is to be copied for profit. Now that the data has been copied against the creator/owners will, they do not receive the profit from that copy.
Yes yes the argument is made that the pirate would not have bought the copy anyways, but having free copies of the content available on the internet decreases the desire for people to obtain paid copies of the data. At the very least it gives people an option not to pay for the data, which is not what the creator wanted in creating it. They are entitled to fair compensation to their work.
It is true that pirating is not directly theft, but it does definitely take away from the creator's/distributor's profit.
Devil's Advocate: Many pirates would have not paid for access to that media so to say it takes away from the creators profit isn't exactly true since one act of piracy does not equal one lost sale.
Devil's Advocate Part II: There is s significant amount of research that supports the notion that pirates actually spend more money on media than the average person.
I personally am an example of part II. I pirate a lot of music but I refuse to use Spotify because of how little it pays artists and I have also spent significant amounts of money buying music from artists I enjoy via Bandcamp or buying from the artist directly because I know they get a bigger cut of the profits that way.
Before piracy there were demos and shareware, which let you see if your machine could handle the game or content and give you a vertical slice, and let you show it to friends for word of mouth advertising.
Then, Steam put a two hour refund window with no questions asked, which helped a lot of "this crashes on start, I can't open this at all on a RTX 4090/high end PC, 15 FPS in the fog, etc".
Developers learned from that and they began padding/gating content behind two hours of gameplay, so you wouldn't know until 3-4 hours in that the game was grindy dogshit (SCUM, Ark, Empyrion, and countless other Early Access and sometimes full release titles like NMS on launch day for example).
So the correct thing to do, and it's what I do: Pirate the game, make sure it runs/works and is fun and there's no "gotcha" traps or hidden DLCs or other predatory mechanics involved, and THEN pay for the full title on Steam+DLCs and just continue the save.
My Steam Account has actually already been flagged over a dozen times for this because my primary savegames are like Razor1911.sav, and so far it's still in good status because I am actually spending a couple thousand/year on content.
This logic does no justice to the objective financial harm being done to the creators/owners of valuable data/content/media.
"Financial harm" is a loaded term. People expected to make money and then didn't, but is that a bad thing?
What if the US president declared that it is now a legal requirement that every American subscribe to a new paid tier of Facebook, and that declaration was rubber stamped by the lawmakers. Anybody who didn't capitulate would be doing "financial harm" to Meta, but is that really a fair way to frame that? If a bully wants your lunch money and you resist, are you doing "financial harm" to the bully?
The way I see things, the initial copyright laws were a relatively fair trade: a 14 year monopoly on something, that could be renewed for another 14 years if the author was still alive. In exchange, everything after that term became part of the public domain. So, it would encourage people to produce writing, and the public would benefit because a reasonable amount of time later what was produced would be available to everybody at no cost. Modern copyright terms are a massive give-away to Hollywood, the record labels, etc. So, while it's true that infringing copyright does reduce the potential amount of money a copyright holder might hope to receive, morally it's closer to fighting off a bully than it is to theft.
