Corporations make decision that are predatory and then complain when people avoid them. For example, there has been much talk about "bad" passengers on airplanes. But there is little discussion about the increasingly inhumane people must endure to fly. Somehow the corporations expect people to endure over crowding, exasperating loading conditions, angry and surly "attendants", delays, bad food and more. Then when some passenger loses it, the problem is never the conditions, it is the passenger.
The same is true for digital content. Amazon "sells" you movies (as do others like Apple), but do you "own" the movie? No. Amazon can just tell you it is no longer available. You cannot "sell" the movie you "bought" to some other person. But you bought it right? People in general are of good will. But if you treat them as prey at some point they recognize these corporations are simply predators. In my opinion there is a very strong case to be made that people who decide not to be victims are of better character than these predatory corporations.
[edit: removed the line "May their travels ever be delayed." because it was not clear I meant predatory corporations]
There's a 'concentration' (of people / power) effect by the creation of a business or company or corporation that makes said entity more appealing to cater to by government than individuals; centralisation is more efficient than decentralisation.
There's also the fact that, historically at least, business entities were created to serve a public need, and therefore these business entities should be encouraged to grow their service to greater satisfy the need.
Government still acts as if this is the case despite that many business entities are the grotesque offspring of that old idea, having evolved through perverse incentives into todays unrecognisable mutants of 'responsibility to shareholders' that are hideous to look upon.
I live in Asia. Passengers are treated with respect, I've never seen a 'surely' employee, nor do I remember seeing a misbehaving passenger, other than a drunk Russian guy who had shit himself by 9am while checking in. His wife didn't look happy.
If I could actually buy movies and TV shows for download I would; I buy all my music as sites like bleep.com allow you to easily buy mp3s, probably thousands of dollars over the years. I've tried buying shows a handful of times before. But I travel a lot and they're geolocked - WTF can't I watch my fully paid for episodes of Rick and Morty on youtube wherever I happen to be?
Since studios have made purchasing impossible, I don't, and I don't give them any money via streaming services either.
There is one exception I can think of: https://www.teamstarkid.com/ They've made their (awesome!) musicals available for purchase, with a true video download. So they've gotten a well-deserved $50 from me.
I believe if businesses want to stop piracy, they need to start making superior products and platforms. If we put away cost completely for a service, allowing it to be any exorbitant amount, the final question is: Is this a better experience than I could have gotten for free?
It makes zero economical sense why you would pay for an inferior experience, such as being geo-locked. Netflix apparently throttles your bitrate/resolution if you're not watching from a smart TV. Sony can revoke at will media that you "bought".
Steam is a great example of what to do. Could I have pirated all my games? Absolutely, but having them on Steam--crucially--makes life easier. I get automatic updates, social integration, achievements, steam cloud saves, remote play, centralized screenshots, easy linux support via proton, etc.
I have no interest in having to buying something that might want me to pay extra premium on top just for a 4K version, or a streaming service that cycles films in and out that leaves me unable to watch a great title I saw 2 years ago. The biggest sin of all is not letting you download titles. F** me I guess if I want to download & watch a movie offline while sitting in transit. F** me if I want to download a title on WiFi to watch later when I'm out and about as to not use cellular data.
I really enjoy Graphic Audio's audiobooks (full voice cast, music, SFX, high quality production). Their titles can all be bought outright, which is great as I spend a lot of time on a plane or away from a cell signal or internet capable of streaming even audio. It's a great approach, but I'm sure there are not a ton of folks who end up buying episodes, it's an expensive way to approach media, certainly.
I agree, they are both good and expensive. Audiobooks are in general, which is unfortunate although makes sense considering you need, in this case, so many people producing 10-20 hours of content
Audiobooks.com can be much cheaper, click through from Google shopping
"If I could actually buy movies and TV shows for download I would"
I wouldn't for one simple reason: the canon of classic cinema that one needs to watch and rewatch in order to have a solid knowledge of the art form, consists of many hundreds of films. Multiply that by the cost of purchasing individual films, and you arrive at a total cost that even most people in highly paid countries would find unbearable, let alone less fortunate regions of the world. And while some very lucky people might have access to public libraries that can supply rips, you can't expect the rest of the planet to go without culture, so torrenting it is, just like how Anna's Archive and LibGen have opened literature still under copyright to all.
Agreed completely, and you touch upon something very poignant.
Those living in poverty already fall short of fulfilling their hierarchy of needs in many ways. They certainly do not have the money to access film and media, so it's not like the production company is losing out on sales.
Do we really want to take the position of putting forth a monetary requirement for cultural enrichment (by condemning piracy)? It isn't like stealing someone's movie or concert ticket, where it deprives someone else of their enjoyment. It's a societal net-positive in all regards.
When it comes to mediums of knowledge such as books, the argument becomes even stronger. There are so many books that are either exorbitantly priced or just completely unavailable. We live in an age where we can send robots to other planets, create AIs that beat the Turing Test, and communicate with (almost) the entirety of the global population from a small rectangle in our pockets--but you're telling me I can't read this book because either I don't have $200 or because there's only 10 physical copies and they're all rented out? The hill that knowledge and information should be accessible to everyone is the hill I'm willing to die on.
In the VHS and DVD days it was common for people to have large video collections that cost them thousands of dollars to obtain; as I said, I personally have probably spent a few thousand on music in my lifetime.
Artists - and even movie studios - do deserve to get paid. I have no qualms with paying them so long as the arrangement is reasonable. Paying for downloads that I actually own is reasonable; streaming is not.
As for everyone else... I could pirate my music too. But I don't because I can afford it, so I should pay for it.
The fact that geolocking also affects "downloads" really sucks. On our last holiday I prepared a tablet with downloaded content from Netflix and Disney for my 5 year old. But when we got there we couldn't play it, as it was geolocked. Next time I'll just use torrents.
> Information being free and the ability to change information are two different things
A bank CEO adding zeroes to their own account doesn't deprive any specific person of anything. We still consider it stealing because of its systemic effects.
For creative works, there's always a license behind it post the invention of copyright. It wasn't as obvious in the past now that DRM and digital/streaming only has given studios/publishers/etc the ability to cancel your access at their discretion. Though complicating matters is that there's increasingly nothing worth spending money on in the first place anymore.
> It wasn't as obvious in the past now that DRM and digital/streaming only has given studios/publishers/etc the ability to cancel your access at their discretion.
And that right there is the crux of the argument. Cancelling access to physical media was never a thing, because you "bought" it. Digital media shouldn't be any different. If I buy a file and someday it doesn't work because of something you did, you're responsible for it, but corporations have been able to get away with no responsibility. Example:
Not true. If you buy a book, it is yours. You can literally do anything you want with it. They cannot reclaim it. You cannot create a copy of the book, but that has nothing to do with owning an individual book.
It's not only about restictions on buying and selling, it's also about restictions on using (where, for how long, can it be inherited) which are dictated by the vendor.
he didn't say stealing isn't piracy, in which case your point would stand - he says piracy isn't stealing. piracy could be a lot of things, but stealing isn't one of them.
Ok, so there is one similarity there. If you pay for an organ transplant you can't sell that organ again, because it is illegal to sell your own organs. Although you might be able to donate it on your death depending on the circumstances.
But the reasons for prohibiting resell are very different. For organs, selling organs is prohibited in order to protect individuals from being pressured or otherwise exploited into selling their organs. But for media, publishing and distribution companies are using technical measures and what is, IMO, an abuse of copyright law to maximize profits.
No real estate is bought and owned without restrictions. And between taxes and bans, one’s relationship with other owned property is similarly revocable.
> the dealership can still repossess the car you haven’t bought it yet
If you bought your car with financing, it cannot be stolen?
> New house requires being an HOA member? Not a sale
> the argument about you not really "owning" stuff even when the button says "buy" is a legal one
Ownership is a stack of rights. It's a social construct--you can't lab test for ownership. It's meaningless to say what "really" owning means without specifying which of those rights you view to be essential in this situation.
in some states (e.g. Virginia) you don’t get to own a car. you have to pay for the right to own a car each year in October via 4+% tax on your car’s current value. ‘merica at its finest :)
> Making a copy of a purely intangible set of data doesn’t deprive someone of that data
You’re making an argument on the non-rivalry of digital content. This is one of the good arguments I referenced.
Digital content is currently a club good, like broadcast television. (Excludable.) You’re arguing for treating it like a public good, like a park. (Not excludable.)
Ownership being a social construct makes statements like stealing X has meaning somewhat useless, particularly when it comes to rules.
Social construct != meaningless. Money and laws are also social constructs. But you can’t argue for money or laws or marriage by beginning and ending with whether you feel like it has meaning.
Saying "piracy supports organized crime" as a scare tactic is a new one to me, and doesn't seem like a very effective campaign. What would be their motivation, shitty ad revenue?
Know what supports organized crime? The copyright-supported media titans that closed ranks to cover up the career-spanning crimes of all the Weinsteins, Cosbys, Diddys, and Saviles of the world.
Interestingly, Diddy shares a cell (dormitory-style room) with SBF; small world.
> [Diddy] was arrested and indicted in the Southern District of New York in September 2024 on charges of racketeering, sex trafficking by force, and transportation for purposes of prostitution. He is awaiting trial in federal custody at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. His cellmate is Sam Bankman-Fried, who is serving a 25-year sentence.
Not to mention their cover ups and distractions from far larger crimes - decades of cheerleading the 'war on terror', stirring up Islamophobia, ignoring Israeli atrocities, spreading climate change FUD, etc etc.
Saville was mind-meltingly evil, but in terms of the damage done, even he pales in comparison to Cheney, W, Obama, Netanyahu, Biden, Murdoch, etc.
Many people won't like these facts, and will reject them with prejudice. And that's largely because of corporate media :/
So yeah, the hypocrisy really stings when they try to blame online piracy for the state of the world. It's staggering weaponized hypocrisy.
well, the bleeding heart "you make indies unable to operate" didn't work. So you gotta move to fear, no matter how bad the argument. Everyone responds to fear when done right.
digital copys can not be considered real property,and therefor able to be "stolen"
with legal repercusions, until and only when digital copys of music can be bought,sold,resold,traded,and,returned, and insured against loss, and of course reposesed in the case of theft.
corporation, no. the small people, yes. You can take a lot of losses when you have a billion dollars in the bank. Not so much when you got maybe 1000 (on a good day).
I used to download torrents of tv shows less because it was cheap, and more because it was way more convenient than watching them through legal means — I could download them and then watch them when/wherever I wanted.
For me, the content providers have now basically solved for that with streaming services, I find that way more convenient than dealing with torrents.
It’s definitely not cheap, I’m paying for at least five streaming services right now, but it’s fast and easy and for me that’s worth it.
Torrents UX isn't uTorrent anymore, there are Netflix like UX solutions to piracy 2024. Feel free to pay, I'm happy to freeload off faceless megacorps profit margins.
I pay for YouTube Premium and Spotify premium, I'd probably pay for Netflix if I didn't need D+, Showtime, Viaplay etc... To access all I want to watch.
Watching people square this mentality with training LLM's on art has been fascinating, and really highlights that people are by and large just in it for themselves.
What do you mean "their own private use"? OpenAI isn't letting me download the material they train on.
If you mean because OpenAI is selling access to the LLMs then an artist is doing the same selling art which was painted using skills they gained from consuming pirated material
Of course some Copyright Fans want to give artists cuts of AI revenue if the material was used for training. Laws that will absolutely never be used on human artists of course...
Copyright has always allowed for educational usage.
Writers read other author's books. Artists study other painters and sculptors. Actors and directors watch other movies. Musicians learn to play other artists songs before they ever start composing their own.
The big media copyright cartel has tried to steal that right from the public good by pretending that they're entitled to even more payments for training usage, but thankfully it's clear that no regular people agree with them.
Why would it be hard to square the mentality of "pirating art to watch is acceptable" with the mentality of "pirating art to train LLMs on is acceptable"?
It depends. If your premise for "pirating art to watch is acceptable" is "information should be free to be replicated and reused", then it is also obvious that "pirating art to train LLMs on is acceptable".
What premise that can infer "pirating art to watch is acceptable" can also simultaneously infer "pirating art to train LLMs on is not acceptable"? "Information should be free to be replicated and reused as long as you're not making a profit"? This would rule out OpenAI, but Stable Diffusion would be acceptable (it's a true non-profit).
What other premises could there be? "One should be able to watch all information, but not replicate it"? But you can't pirate without replicating the information. "You shouldn't repost stuff without consent"? But this rules out piracy.
"Information should be free to be replicated and reused as long as it comes from a big corporation"? But piracy from indie games is a thing, too. And how do you define "big"? Also, is training stuff solely on Getty, Shutterstock etc okay, then? What about books3? "But even though publishers own the rights to the book, individual authors wrote it." But the same is true for piracy from big corporations. People worked on it.
This is why it's so hard to square it, because I cannot see any rational moral foundation that simultaneously condones piracy (possibly indie games too) while condemning Stable Diffusion and the hobbyist AI ecosystem. The only other explanation is that it is irrational, or as the GP put it, "that people are by and large just in it for themselves". Piracy for me but not for thee.
GenAI content isn’t afforded copyright protection so that feels like a coincidental good tradeoff
I’ve made money from genAI content but i don’t care if someone copied it, it’s a risk I took, they don’t have the network and community I do which is the value.
The alternative is that "not playing media you can't buy" is also an acceptable way to save money. There's so much free media out there these days that you could spend your life ethically consuming media without ever spending a dime.
I'm no snitch, so do what you need to do. But I feel this mentality of it being "acceptable" only further devalues art. And the endgoal isn't some utopia where we all make art for free. Just look at the mobile industry for this race to the bottom. Tons of "free" mobile games, after all..
I am not sure. I think piracy does deprive others of revenue. The only reason it feels acceptable is because it concerns information instead of something physical. The gray area for me is how ownership isn’t real even when you legally purchase something. For example, when Amazon deleted copies of digital books from customers’ Kindles.
Surprise, that's what you get for ... half a dozen worth of streaming services these days with none sharing their catalogue?
It's not that hard. Spotify and Apple Music both have all the music one can ever want, why the fuck didn't the movie/TV industry consolidate on Netflix... greedy morons.
There was a brief post COVID period where we hung out. It got a lot harder to contact them when almost all of us got laid off in different companies. I still do reach out (I was laid off too. I think I was the first in my circle), but it quickly became COVID hard again.
As a Norwegian just above 30, I guess I'm a bit outside. But my impression is that most people don't pirate movies or music to the same extent we did when I was younger. What's being pirated now is often live sports.
Watching Premier League costs about $75 a month. Why? Do the multi-millionaire soccer players really need that much? What happens with the sport when a whole generation of new fans can't afford to watch?
I also wanted to watch the Alpine World Cup today, but due to weird licensing issues with winter sports from Austria it's not on any channel I can buy.
Imagine if someone bought a royal permission to "own" the image of Mt. Everest, hired a bunch of gangsters and tried to chase and beat up everyone who dared to look at the mountain without paying a fee? That's the modern copyright holders, the wannabe aristocracy of the digital world.
Corporations make decision that are predatory and then complain when people avoid them. For example, there has been much talk about "bad" passengers on airplanes. But there is little discussion about the increasingly inhumane people must endure to fly. Somehow the corporations expect people to endure over crowding, exasperating loading conditions, angry and surly "attendants", delays, bad food and more. Then when some passenger loses it, the problem is never the conditions, it is the passenger.
The same is true for digital content. Amazon "sells" you movies (as do others like Apple), but do you "own" the movie? No. Amazon can just tell you it is no longer available. You cannot "sell" the movie you "bought" to some other person. But you bought it right? People in general are of good will. But if you treat them as prey at some point they recognize these corporations are simply predators. In my opinion there is a very strong case to be made that people who decide not to be victims are of better character than these predatory corporations.
[edit: removed the line "May their travels ever be delayed." because it was not clear I meant predatory corporations]
There's a 'concentration' (of people / power) effect by the creation of a business or company or corporation that makes said entity more appealing to cater to by government than individuals; centralisation is more efficient than decentralisation.
There's also the fact that, historically at least, business entities were created to serve a public need, and therefore these business entities should be encouraged to grow their service to greater satisfy the need.
Government still acts as if this is the case despite that many business entities are the grotesque offspring of that old idea, having evolved through perverse incentives into todays unrecognisable mutants of 'responsibility to shareholders' that are hideous to look upon.
I live in Asia. Passengers are treated with respect, I've never seen a 'surely' employee, nor do I remember seeing a misbehaving passenger, other than a drunk Russian guy who had shit himself by 9am while checking in. His wife didn't look happy.
If I could actually buy movies and TV shows for download I would; I buy all my music as sites like bleep.com allow you to easily buy mp3s, probably thousands of dollars over the years. I've tried buying shows a handful of times before. But I travel a lot and they're geolocked - WTF can't I watch my fully paid for episodes of Rick and Morty on youtube wherever I happen to be?
Since studios have made purchasing impossible, I don't, and I don't give them any money via streaming services either.
There is one exception I can think of: https://www.teamstarkid.com/ They've made their (awesome!) musicals available for purchase, with a true video download. So they've gotten a well-deserved $50 from me.
I believe if businesses want to stop piracy, they need to start making superior products and platforms. If we put away cost completely for a service, allowing it to be any exorbitant amount, the final question is: Is this a better experience than I could have gotten for free?
It makes zero economical sense why you would pay for an inferior experience, such as being geo-locked. Netflix apparently throttles your bitrate/resolution if you're not watching from a smart TV. Sony can revoke at will media that you "bought".
Steam is a great example of what to do. Could I have pirated all my games? Absolutely, but having them on Steam--crucially--makes life easier. I get automatic updates, social integration, achievements, steam cloud saves, remote play, centralized screenshots, easy linux support via proton, etc.
I have no interest in having to buying something that might want me to pay extra premium on top just for a 4K version, or a streaming service that cycles films in and out that leaves me unable to watch a great title I saw 2 years ago. The biggest sin of all is not letting you download titles. F** me I guess if I want to download & watch a movie offline while sitting in transit. F** me if I want to download a title on WiFi to watch later when I'm out and about as to not use cellular data.
I really enjoy Graphic Audio's audiobooks (full voice cast, music, SFX, high quality production). Their titles can all be bought outright, which is great as I spend a lot of time on a plane or away from a cell signal or internet capable of streaming even audio. It's a great approach, but I'm sure there are not a ton of folks who end up buying episodes, it's an expensive way to approach media, certainly.
I agree, they are both good and expensive. Audiobooks are in general, which is unfortunate although makes sense considering you need, in this case, so many people producing 10-20 hours of content
Audiobooks.com can be much cheaper, click through from Google shopping
"If I could actually buy movies and TV shows for download I would"
I wouldn't for one simple reason: the canon of classic cinema that one needs to watch and rewatch in order to have a solid knowledge of the art form, consists of many hundreds of films. Multiply that by the cost of purchasing individual films, and you arrive at a total cost that even most people in highly paid countries would find unbearable, let alone less fortunate regions of the world. And while some very lucky people might have access to public libraries that can supply rips, you can't expect the rest of the planet to go without culture, so torrenting it is, just like how Anna's Archive and LibGen have opened literature still under copyright to all.
Agreed completely, and you touch upon something very poignant.
Those living in poverty already fall short of fulfilling their hierarchy of needs in many ways. They certainly do not have the money to access film and media, so it's not like the production company is losing out on sales.
Do we really want to take the position of putting forth a monetary requirement for cultural enrichment (by condemning piracy)? It isn't like stealing someone's movie or concert ticket, where it deprives someone else of their enjoyment. It's a societal net-positive in all regards.
When it comes to mediums of knowledge such as books, the argument becomes even stronger. There are so many books that are either exorbitantly priced or just completely unavailable. We live in an age where we can send robots to other planets, create AIs that beat the Turing Test, and communicate with (almost) the entirety of the global population from a small rectangle in our pockets--but you're telling me I can't read this book because either I don't have $200 or because there's only 10 physical copies and they're all rented out? The hill that knowledge and information should be accessible to everyone is the hill I'm willing to die on.
In the VHS and DVD days it was common for people to have large video collections that cost them thousands of dollars to obtain; as I said, I personally have probably spent a few thousand on music in my lifetime.
Artists - and even movie studios - do deserve to get paid. I have no qualms with paying them so long as the arrangement is reasonable. Paying for downloads that I actually own is reasonable; streaming is not.
As for everyone else... I could pirate my music too. But I don't because I can afford it, so I should pay for it.
The fact that geolocking also affects "downloads" really sucks. On our last holiday I prepared a tablet with downloaded content from Netflix and Disney for my 5 year old. But when we got there we couldn't play it, as it was geolocked. Next time I'll just use torrents.
If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing, so...
When someone tells me that downloading a song or a movie is like stealing, I usually encourage them to download a new car.
> When someone tells me that downloading a song or a movie is like stealing, I usually encourage them to download a new car
Now do social security benefits. Or hell, money in a bank account.
Information being free and the ability to change information are two different things.
> Information being free and the ability to change information are two different things
A bank CEO adding zeroes to their own account doesn't deprive any specific person of anything. We still consider it stealing because of its systemic effects.
For creative works, there's always a license behind it post the invention of copyright. It wasn't as obvious in the past now that DRM and digital/streaming only has given studios/publishers/etc the ability to cancel your access at their discretion. Though complicating matters is that there's increasingly nothing worth spending money on in the first place anymore.
> It wasn't as obvious in the past now that DRM and digital/streaming only has given studios/publishers/etc the ability to cancel your access at their discretion.
And that right there is the crux of the argument. Cancelling access to physical media was never a thing, because you "bought" it. Digital media shouldn't be any different. If I buy a file and someday it doesn't work because of something you did, you're responsible for it, but corporations have been able to get away with no responsibility. Example:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2023/12/02/playstatio...
Not true. If you buy a book, it is yours. You can literally do anything you want with it. They cannot reclaim it. You cannot create a copy of the book, but that has nothing to do with owning an individual book.
Your point is incoherent.Could you restate?
Are you suggesting that we never had ownership, it just wasn't obvious? If so, please cite your sources.
> If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing, so...
This is a bad argument for piracy. (There are good ones.) Plenty of things that can't be bought and sold without restriction can be stolen.
It's not only about restictions on buying and selling, it's also about restictions on using (where, for how long, can it be inherited) which are dictated by the vendor.
> it's also about restictions on using (where, for how long, can it be inherited) which are dictated by the vendor
Sure. Again, this is true for a wide variety of things. Many of which we commonly consider to be stealable.
Such as?
I've always thought there was a clever hack to get out of deed restrictions through the use of adverse possession.
Won't work, recorded deed restrictions run with the land.
he didn't say stealing isn't piracy, in which case your point would stand - he says piracy isn't stealing. piracy could be a lot of things, but stealing isn't one of them.
Such as?
Organs
Ok, so there is one similarity there. If you pay for an organ transplant you can't sell that organ again, because it is illegal to sell your own organs. Although you might be able to donate it on your death depending on the circumstances.
But the reasons for prohibiting resell are very different. For organs, selling organs is prohibited in order to protect individuals from being pressured or otherwise exploited into selling their organs. But for media, publishing and distribution companies are using technical measures and what is, IMO, an abuse of copyright law to maximize profits.
There’s a market for cadavers.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-bodi...
And it's tightly regulated.
So are cars, it’s still a sale and actual ownership.
> it’s still a sale and actual ownership
What makes it actual versus pretend ownership? Remember, ownership is a social construct.
Finality. Does the seller or creator having a say in what you do with something after the transaction? If so it’s not a sale.
If the dealership can still repossess the car you haven’t bought it yet. New house requires being an HOA member? Not a sale.
> Finality
No real estate is bought and owned without restrictions. And between taxes and bans, one’s relationship with other owned property is similarly revocable.
> the dealership can still repossess the car you haven’t bought it yet
If you bought your car with financing, it cannot be stolen?
> New house requires being an HOA member? Not a sale
So if your house has an HOA it cannot be stolen?
> Remember, ownership is a social construct.
But the argument about you not really "owning" stuff even when the button says "buy" is a legal one.
> the argument about you not really "owning" stuff even when the button says "buy" is a legal one
Ownership is a stack of rights. It's a social construct--you can't lab test for ownership. It's meaningless to say what "really" owning means without specifying which of those rights you view to be essential in this situation.
in some states (e.g. Virginia) you don’t get to own a car. you have to pay for the right to own a car each year in October via 4+% tax on your car’s current value. ‘merica at its finest :)
> Such as?
Tickets to a live performance. Health information. Public benefits. Tax refunds. Rental cars.
You just listed things that are regularly resold.
> You just listed things that are regularly resold
Yes? I said "things that can't be bought and sold without restriction."
Are you saying it's not pirating if there's a resellable DVD available?
Stealing a physical DVD has meaning. Making a copy of a purely intangible set of data doesn’t deprive someone of that data.
> Making a copy of a purely intangible set of data doesn’t deprive someone of that data
You’re making an argument on the non-rivalry of digital content. This is one of the good arguments I referenced.
Digital content is currently a club good, like broadcast television. (Excludable.) You’re arguing for treating it like a public good, like a park. (Not excludable.)
Ownership being a social construct makes statements like stealing X has meaning somewhat useless, particularly when it comes to rules.
Marriage is a social construct, but that doesn’t make the word meaningless.
Buying a fork isn’t a marriage.
Social construct != meaningless. Money and laws are also social constructs. But you can’t argue for money or laws or marriage by beginning and ending with whether you feel like it has meaning.
Plutonium.
Plutonium does get sold, look up certified reference materials.
"without restriction"
Saying "piracy supports organized crime" as a scare tactic is a new one to me, and doesn't seem like a very effective campaign. What would be their motivation, shitty ad revenue?
Know what supports organized crime? The copyright-supported media titans that closed ranks to cover up the career-spanning crimes of all the Weinsteins, Cosbys, Diddys, and Saviles of the world.
Interestingly, Diddy shares a cell (dormitory-style room) with SBF; small world.
> [Diddy] was arrested and indicted in the Southern District of New York in September 2024 on charges of racketeering, sex trafficking by force, and transportation for purposes of prostitution. He is awaiting trial in federal custody at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. His cellmate is Sam Bankman-Fried, who is serving a 25-year sentence.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Combs
Not to mention their cover ups and distractions from far larger crimes - decades of cheerleading the 'war on terror', stirring up Islamophobia, ignoring Israeli atrocities, spreading climate change FUD, etc etc.
Saville was mind-meltingly evil, but in terms of the damage done, even he pales in comparison to Cheney, W, Obama, Netanyahu, Biden, Murdoch, etc.
Many people won't like these facts, and will reject them with prejudice. And that's largely because of corporate media :/
So yeah, the hypocrisy really stings when they try to blame online piracy for the state of the world. It's staggering weaponized hypocrisy.
The news media and the copyright cartels are different evils. News media aren't the ones going after torrenters.
Over 90% of news AND entertainment in the US are owned by just 6 companies.
Same companies, same investors, same incentives, same evils.
well, the bleeding heart "you make indies unable to operate" didn't work. So you gotta move to fear, no matter how bad the argument. Everyone responds to fear when done right.
Private trackers might he considered organized crime.
I was guessing stuff like counterfeit DVDs, which also doesn't really have much to do with torrenting
digital copys can not be considered real property,and therefor able to be "stolen" with legal repercusions, until and only when digital copys of music can be bought,sold,resold,traded,and,returned, and insured against loss, and of course reposesed in the case of theft.
What’s wrong with the other half ?
I'm surprised it's not higher. Are the results unusual for an Western country?
other just think pirating is an acceptable way to stick it to the Man.
I never understood why it's all collected under the term piracy. Do we just classify illegally acquiring as piracy?
illegally acquiring? Yes, technically. Otherwise it wouldn't be illegal.
And piracy isn't as harmful as the corporations want you to think: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15305476
corporation, no. the small people, yes. You can take a lot of losses when you have a billion dollars in the bank. Not so much when you got maybe 1000 (on a good day).
I used to download torrents of tv shows less because it was cheap, and more because it was way more convenient than watching them through legal means — I could download them and then watch them when/wherever I wanted.
For me, the content providers have now basically solved for that with streaming services, I find that way more convenient than dealing with torrents.
It’s definitely not cheap, I’m paying for at least five streaming services right now, but it’s fast and easy and for me that’s worth it.
Torrents UX isn't uTorrent anymore, there are Netflix like UX solutions to piracy 2024. Feel free to pay, I'm happy to freeload off faceless megacorps profit margins.
I pay for YouTube Premium and Spotify premium, I'd probably pay for Netflix if I didn't need D+, Showtime, Viaplay etc... To access all I want to watch.
Vikings gonna viking.
Warms my heart, living in Norway atm.
Watching people square this mentality with training LLM's on art has been fascinating, and really highlights that people are by and large just in it for themselves.
No one you're complaining about would care if people were training LLMs on pirated material for their own private use.
What do you mean "their own private use"? OpenAI isn't letting me download the material they train on.
If you mean because OpenAI is selling access to the LLMs then an artist is doing the same selling art which was painted using skills they gained from consuming pirated material
Of course some Copyright Fans want to give artists cuts of AI revenue if the material was used for training. Laws that will absolutely never be used on human artists of course...
Copyright has always allowed for educational usage.
Writers read other author's books. Artists study other painters and sculptors. Actors and directors watch other movies. Musicians learn to play other artists songs before they ever start composing their own.
The big media copyright cartel has tried to steal that right from the public good by pretending that they're entitled to even more payments for training usage, but thankfully it's clear that no regular people agree with them.
Why would it be hard to square the mentality of "pirating art to watch is acceptable" with the mentality of "pirating art to train LLMs on is acceptable"?
It depends. If your premise for "pirating art to watch is acceptable" is "information should be free to be replicated and reused", then it is also obvious that "pirating art to train LLMs on is acceptable".
What premise that can infer "pirating art to watch is acceptable" can also simultaneously infer "pirating art to train LLMs on is not acceptable"? "Information should be free to be replicated and reused as long as you're not making a profit"? This would rule out OpenAI, but Stable Diffusion would be acceptable (it's a true non-profit).
What other premises could there be? "One should be able to watch all information, but not replicate it"? But you can't pirate without replicating the information. "You shouldn't repost stuff without consent"? But this rules out piracy.
"Information should be free to be replicated and reused as long as it comes from a big corporation"? But piracy from indie games is a thing, too. And how do you define "big"? Also, is training stuff solely on Getty, Shutterstock etc okay, then? What about books3? "But even though publishers own the rights to the book, individual authors wrote it." But the same is true for piracy from big corporations. People worked on it.
This is why it's so hard to square it, because I cannot see any rational moral foundation that simultaneously condones piracy (possibly indie games too) while condemning Stable Diffusion and the hobbyist AI ecosystem. The only other explanation is that it is irrational, or as the GP put it, "that people are by and large just in it for themselves". Piracy for me but not for thee.
GenAI content isn’t afforded copyright protection so that feels like a coincidental good tradeoff
I’ve made money from genAI content but i don’t care if someone copied it, it’s a risk I took, they don’t have the network and community I do which is the value.
The alternative is that "not playing media you can't buy" is also an acceptable way to save money. There's so much free media out there these days that you could spend your life ethically consuming media without ever spending a dime.
I'm no snitch, so do what you need to do. But I feel this mentality of it being "acceptable" only further devalues art. And the endgoal isn't some utopia where we all make art for free. Just look at the mobile industry for this race to the bottom. Tons of "free" mobile games, after all..
I am not sure. I think piracy does deprive others of revenue. The only reason it feels acceptable is because it concerns information instead of something physical. The gray area for me is how ownership isn’t real even when you legally purchase something. For example, when Amazon deleted copies of digital books from customers’ Kindles.
Surprise, that's what you get for ... half a dozen worth of streaming services these days with none sharing their catalogue?
It's not that hard. Spotify and Apple Music both have all the music one can ever want, why the fuck didn't the movie/TV industry consolidate on Netflix... greedy morons.
Get together with your friends and watch stuff.
Friends, in this economy? Surely you jest.
There was a brief post COVID period where we hung out. It got a lot harder to contact them when almost all of us got laid off in different companies. I still do reach out (I was laid off too. I think I was the first in my circle), but it quickly became COVID hard again.
No wage. Only buy!
As a Norwegian just above 30, I guess I'm a bit outside. But my impression is that most people don't pirate movies or music to the same extent we did when I was younger. What's being pirated now is often live sports.
Watching Premier League costs about $75 a month. Why? Do the multi-millionaire soccer players really need that much? What happens with the sport when a whole generation of new fans can't afford to watch?
I also wanted to watch the Alpine World Cup today, but due to weird licensing issues with winter sports from Austria it's not on any channel I can buy.
Imagine if someone bought a royal permission to "own" the image of Mt. Everest, hired a bunch of gangsters and tried to chase and beat up everyone who dared to look at the mountain without paying a fee? That's the modern copyright holders, the wannabe aristocracy of the digital world.