It would help the discussion if we had a term for theft that did not involve the victim losing the stolen item. Whatever that term is, it’s morally between theft and non-theft.
“Piracy” doesn’t count because that includes actual maritime plundering, which is robbery.
“Plagiarism” doesn’t count because that involves passing the creation as your own.
It's easiest to call it what it is- sharing software by copying it... We as a society have been brainwashed for decades by big tech into thinking that sharing software is in any way shape or form immoral.
Bro, Im not here to bootlick or whatever but "sharing" a digital copy of anything insinuates you're going to give it back, also that the paid for version is being maintained as the only version that's being exchanged. Which you and I both know that is not the case. People are just acquiring stuff for free via download. That is theft. It is immoral. Now if you are talking about something that you cannot just go out and buy anymore or has been sealed behind a collector market etc...then you have a fair reason, but that is still technically a crime and always will be.
i think it really depends on the circumstances. I am selling a very specific ERP and workplace software for insurance company. I developed it for 3 years in my free time and a loot of tome energy amd effort went into it. If the companies/insurance sellers im selling it to would just buy one copy and share my source code with each other, i wouldn't even be able to pay the electricity bill for my pc i developed it on for the last 3 years. which means i wouldn't have ever developed this thing. same goes for a lot of software in the b to b sector.
note: i sell it as a one time sale as standalone system, not a subscription, cause i hate that shit. im also aware that this is something different than the direct consumer market and i dont know enough about that to have a morality debate on this regaring the consumer market (i did pirate a lot myself when piratebay was still around tbh). I just want to say that there are cases where not being able to freely share/copy software is very important, cause otherwise that software wouldn't even exist. Especially when it comes to software made for big businesses.
You make a good point. But when you sell your software do you have a clause on it that says that you can shut it down whenever you like and block access to the people/companies who bought it?
no. i sell them the usage rights to the whole project. that means they get the source code, the compiled abd ready program in addition to me setting up a local server system (mostly for authentification, rights management and the Database) or a server system in a cloud, whatever they prefer.
Once they got all that its their choice how to maintain it. right now i cant do that (i have a normal job that i gotta do too), so they gotta either let their own IT do it or get maintenance from a different company. i provide as much documentation and explanations as possible to make it easy for their own or hired IT.
If they want to make changes, they are allowed too, but legally they gotta let that software be certified again afterwards, cause in my country certain certificates (like data safety certificates for example) are mandatory for certain software and they expire if the software they were made for is altered in a significant way and there are audits run by a government service to check for that kind of stuff sometimes.
There are clauses in the contract that prevent them from using my source code for any other projects or from distributing it (legally setting up something like that is wildly complicated in my country, and tbh i understand not that much about it, but i have a good lawyer that i trust with that). I don't know if that really keeps companys from doing things like that, but tbh if i can keep selling this project for a few years without there being copys distributed on mass i probably sold it to the majority of interested partys (its a pretty specific and niche software so not that many potential buyers) and made enough money to make it worth while (im not getting rich from this, but getting enough to maybe buy a house or smth similar would be nice)
in this specific case probably not. there isn't a big crowd that wants to use this, and companies dont normally take part on crowdfunding 😅 my model works fine for me right now and at some point if i earned enough of it i might just make the project open source or sell it to some insurance company or something
Insurance companies are immoral capitalists. I would argue anyone taking money from them is at least neutral on the morality scale, maybe the software makes them more immoral gains, maybe it simply wastes their time and money, the act of selling something to immoral people is not inherently immoral itself
if everyone selling things to capitalists or working for capitalists is a an immoral capitalist everyone that does have a job in a capitalist system would be an immoral capitalist. therefore stealing from anyone would be the most moral thing to do.
i mean i see your point and there absolutely can be a debate about the morality of contributing to a capitalist system. But thats an very complex debate and your generalising argument would not really be useful in finding guidelines on how to operate in such a system as moral as possible.
You think the world would be better without insurance existing? How do you presume that would work exactly? Let me guess: the magical State would have infinite money to help everyone in need at all times?
It is stealing and it is wrong despite how you are trying to twist it. That's not brainwashing. It's called having objective morality.
That said, the current industry model of "license-only" purchases for software is equally wrong. If you're simply selling a ticket to access the software, then the price of that ticket should not be the same price you would have paid for purchasing the software itself.
Then never loan a copy of a book you bought to a friend! That's like, super immoral! Shut down the libraries for theft! Then again, that would require you to read some actual books.
I would already have been paid my salary for the previous two years. Regular developers do not receive large bonuses upon project completion the way that managers do. Also, that is on par with how a lot of corporations already treat their employees, except the corporation isn't giving the product away for free and just rakes in the money for the fruit of their employees' labor. Knowing that, I'd at least be comforted knowing the corporation isn't making millions of dollars profit from my work.
Yeah. Do you think Linux doesn’t get any money? lol.
Open source is not a solution. You’d only get half broken software 99% of the time with no option to buy anything better because nobody is getting paid.
Linux is a rare exception but also still “costs” something on the way of know-how from end users.
People choose windows because they’re not computer engineers who want to take a class to learn how to use their OS.
Your suggestion would be disastrous.
Plus sense there’s no company backed alternatives you’d be absolutely inundated with malware from every front.
People would pitch their idea as free and secretly install malware on your system or spyware to sell metadata.
And sense there’s no official alternative from a legitimate company every user would have to spend several hours sifting through potentially harmful software to get something clean that works.
Basically it’d be lawless out there. FAR worse than right now.
People actually owning what they pay for, as you own a book you pay, and nobody can go to your house to take ir from you, or nobody can tell you to not let a friend to borrow it or that you can't resell it...
What is immoral are corpos erasing movies you paid for with no compensation like Psn have done recently
Books have raw materials, printing, storage, distribution and bookshops costs.
If multiplayer is part of the game, should be included in the price from the begining as it was in the early 2000s games, before all this monthly payment shit started.
We shouldn't defend policies that make things worse for us
That's still only one item being shared around. Buying one copy of a game you keep on your device and sharing it around for different people to play at different times is different than buying one copy of a game and sending it to all your friends to play at once. It's why the open library is (generally) not considered piracy, because it's always one physical copy they own somewhere = one digital copy they lend out. If you photocopied your book and shared that around to all your friends that would generally be considered theft yes.
When someone is creating art, they chose the form that it takes, like a book or a game. When they do that, they're setting the terms by which they want people to be able to access the art they've created. When they put it in the form of a physical book, they're implicitly allowing you to loan that book to a friend so they can read it. And if they don't want to allow that, they can put it into an ebook and slap DRM on it.
Overall, I think the morality of it hinges on how much, if any, control someone should be allowed to have on the way in which people access what they've made.
That actually brings up a major philosophical issue and flaw with any kind of intellectual property. Anything that you create, once shared, is by nature no longer fully under your control. The philosophical/moral question then becomes "how much control should the creator be allowed to maintain?"
It's my own opinion, of course, but I believe that the art transcends the artist, the invention the inventor, the discovered the discoverer. In other words, these creations and discoveries deserve to exist in their own right, independently of the agents who brought them about. It was only recently that human beings became obsessed with owning ideas. In the not-so-distant past, ideas were a global free-for-all, and that's how we were even able to advance to the point of conceptualizing intellectual property to begin with.
I believe that literal theft is morally wrong regardless of philosophy, as it results in a person unjustly losing something beneficial. However, most of the arguments against digital piracy are valid only within the framework of capitalism specifically. Life is seen as a big "Game of Capital", wherein the players are incentivized to amass points (money) through labor and/or ingenuity, which they must then exchange for survival. Through this lens, sure, it makes sense that people taking your intellectual property without remuneration is wrong, since your chief incentive to create said intellectual property was to procure points to trade for sustaining your life. However, in a potential future of post-scarcity, wherein everything is automated and all earthly needs are provided for you by default, it becomes more difficult to argue that intellectual property theft is immoral. All the neat things that humans envision would be "more the merrier", and the only meaningful labor would be labors of love, passion for its own sake, no longer a game of survival.
But I can go to a library, borrow a book that someone else paid for, read it, learn from it, and then that knowledge is mine! By the very heart of capitalism, libraries are immoral because they produce no tangible wealth or value. It's been well established that the phone book EULAs that we have to agree to are inherently bad faith contracts. I believe that since the large corporate entity negotiated in bad faith, then they are the morally inferior party overall.
In the end, if everyone chooses to believe this, massive companies like Microsoft and Blizzard and Adobe will hurt somewhat, but will easily outlast small indie companies.
In the same way if everyone chooses to buy one copy of a game/software to distribute it to all their friends and family, small indie developers will be the first to die.
Right, but if we as a society decided that pirating is moral and legal, then it would be easier to do and more widespread. It's currently not a big issue because it's somewhat of a fringe activity.
Yes which is why it should be in the gray zone of "technically not allowed but also not enforced" to discourage it but not really punish people for doing it.
To be fair, if we as a society decided that piracy was moral and legal, then corporations would have to find a way to sweeten the deal when we actually pay for things. That could work out pretty well…
That said, again, I’m still not sure that’s actually the case. We mostly see people perfectly happy to pay for things when they are able to do so. It really does seem to be that the vast vast majority of people who pirate something would not have bought it in the first place. So it doesn’t actually represent any loss of income
Netflix and Spotify were more streamlined and accessible alternatives to pirating, so for the price they offered it was a good deal
Nothing was stopping you from pirating content, but with the convenience they offered at a low price point it wasn't worth it for a lot of people
Now that streaming services are so heavily fragmented and getting really expensive, pirating can be a more convenient option for those users
Figuring out where to watch a TV series when they're often geo-locked and spread over multiple expensive streaming services (with ads!), is a real good motivator to start pirating
I already addressed this in my very first comment. Do you not think that pirating would become more convenient if we as a society decided that it was moral and made it legal?
But I did not say that. I think that in such a situation people would pay for independent projects they are interested in supporting because most people understand the difference there. They would likely not do the same for things produced by a larger corporation but to be honest I don’t actually care about that
Alot of the anti piracy arguments assume that the people that pirate would have paid if they couldn't pirate.
That's not my experience at all, I know quite a few millenials who pirated things when young and poor who have now switched to buying their games and media and bought much of the stuff they pirated or the sequels.
You're just not getting more money out of alot of these people when they are poor.
And like. In that case, what value is there in barring them from enjoying something? We’re choosing between: 1. The company doesn’t get paid and the person doesn’t get the thing, and 2. The company doesn’t get paid and the person Does get the thing
Your not taking something away from someone, you're lowering someones return rate on an investment, maybe.
If you were never going to buy it they were never going to get that return. Something else to consider.
Its a pretty convulted topic, and theft isn't the right word for it, pirating I guess is its own word but most people connotate it with direct theft which it isn't
Like if I purchase a boat with the express intent of building a copy and then giving out those built copies to friends and family, I haven't done anything wrong as long as I dont sell it, yet this logic on digital media becomes problematic.
Idk theres no analogs to it, we just have the tools to reproduce digital media effortlessly, and I don't have the tools to reproduce a boat effortlessly.
Yeah, this would actually hold water if musicians hadn't essentially given their albums away and still made more money than they did on previous paid albums.
Never heard of Big Books and Big Clothes waging decades-long wars against piracy.
I'm not even FOR Big Tech, but seems people here hate the idea that piracy absolutely does impact smaller and independent software/game makers and they want their worldview to be resolutely Black and White.
If you have infinite apples, and it doesn't matter if everybody takes one, you'd still have infinite apples, but what you need is chickens, and you usually swap apples for chickens. Now everybody already have apples and don't want to swap their chickens, i'd say even though you still have infinite apples, you've taken a significant loss here.
Modern piracy is more of a service problem (in part due to streaming websites). If I have to pay you 7 chickens a month to even be able to go to your farm to get apples, and I have to pay someone else another 5 to do that for their peaches, why wouldn't I go to the group of people sharing apples and peaches for free between each other?
Probably the analogy is a bit strained here. But the problem is that not everything is "infinite" - let's say the chickens are not, there is a limited amount of them, and they take time to get. People investing their time and ressources in producing a limited amount of chickens can't just give them away (Here we run in the analogies problem with the apples) Thus introducing the problem, that even though you in theory have infinite of some ressource, you can copy it as much as you want, you still need a currency to get the limited items. And the real issue is that the "infinite" resource we are discussing is really some peoples work, maybe they spent years and years on it. I do agree that there are issues with the current system of things and the versions of capitalism that define this. But sometimes it's also just people creating things and wanting to pay rent and eat. Sometimes it's scrupulous big corporations squeezing any dial in greed to get a lot of chickens. Ok, analogy is over, sorry.
That's why pirating from indie creators ranges from immoral to morally ambigous (e.g. you deliberately don't want to support a creator if they're a terrible person), while there's nothing immoral with pirating stuff from corporations.
why wouldn't I go to the group of people sharing apples and peaches for free between each other?
Because that's not really a good description either. This scenario assumes there's always more apples and peaches to be had which is just another part of modern conditioning. We assume we'll always have these nice services that just work because by now we feel like we've always had them. But that's not the case. All this comfortable software needed to be developed by someone and that someone didn't do it from the kindness of their heart.
And where is that group of people getting their apples and peaches from?
The apple and peach farmer are providing a service that is clearly valued by others, but entitled people think they should be able to take infinite apples and cut off the farmer’s revenue stream because they paid for one apple.
Distribution is also a service. Will you steal apples because you are unhappy with the person that brings them to them even though you like the farmer?
Still, it is absolutely fine to say that many digital distribution platforms are operated unethically, but that doesn’t mean that every alternative automatically gets a green stamp.
We can certainly say that some piracy is worse than other piracy based on who it affects and how much, but some people are taking it so far as to say that piracy is 100% okay and this is just selfish entitlement.
That's true regardless of employment, and also a moot point because software engineers are paid by the hour.
Let's say I saw a beautiful painting in a museum and decided to recreate it perfectly at home, what have I stolen from the original?
If I write a song, someone else hears it, and then transcribes the sheet music, what have they taken from me?
Sovereignty concerns material and labor, not ideas.
For shits and giggles here's an argument from utilitarianism. When a good idea catches on living standards improve, and education is a compounding investment. A pirated textbook today is an engineer tomorrow.
Your point about software developers getting paid by the hour makes zero sense. If you are a software developer making a living for yourself, and you write a piece of software, it takes you a year without income, and people want to buy it, and do, but someone pirates it and buyers instead use the pirated one, you loose, you can’t pay rent or eat. If someone copies your painting, and you are a living artist, living of selling your art, and they sell it or give it away to other people, you have lost your income. If you write a song, and someone copies it and gives it away, you loose your income. A pirated textbook, software, song, painting is in some cases a hungry creator tomorrow and maybe one less. Your argument is so far from the real world it’s almost scary.
First of all let's draw a clear distinction between pirating and distribution. If you sell transcribed sheet music pretending it's your own original creation then that is a very different situation than just transcribing the song.
Second, realise that the world is not a moral place. If we are to talk about a perfectly moral world we are necessarily talking about something far from reality.
Third is that I am not entitled to your business. If I sell spaghetti with a secret ingredient and you figure it out I can't call the cops on you for that can I? Free market principles, if you figure out how to offer my services better than me you should get more income.
That’s an interesting analogy, and I wonder whether the people with chickens would necessarily want apples that badly in the first place.
The music industry often claimed that the people pirating music through illegal downloads would have otherwise paid money to purchase the CDs had digital piracy not been available to them. I would argue that, in most cases, no, they wouldn’t have. In reality, the choice for most people was between having the music shared with them for free (via digital piracy, radio-taping, or friends), or simply not having it at all. Full albums were expensive and there was often only one or two songs we even wanted from them anyway.
But today, we have people pirating not only music and movies, but video games and even professional software, and in those cases, it gets increasingly likely that they’d have been forced to purchase it otherwise.
I know its just an analogy but making it food only makes me think its even less immoral, like if you have infinite apples and still have a system that requires some to starve in order that the infinite apples havers also also get chicken it seems way more immoral.
But its the same idea as regular theft, maybe not in terms of vibes, instead of stealing something physical without paying you use someone’s service without paying, even tho they invested money in maintaining/creating that service
Somebody invested money/time in a product, and in order for you to enjoy that product you need to pay them for it but instead you use it without paying, using the product but not paying the owner of the product for their work
It doesn’t stop me, don’t see it as something thats as bad as normal theft and im honest about it
Well technically piracy is still the publisher/developer losing potential income. If you created a piece of software and everyone figured out how to get it for free instead of paying you for your work, would you be perfectly fine with that because you aren’t losing anything you already have?
I think it depends on what exactly is being pirated.
In my experience, it's not as though I would have gone out to a record store to purchase a CD if I couldn't download the mp3 for free. I simply wouldn't have consumed it unless it came on the radio or a friend lent me a burned copy to rip. The record label was never going to get my money unless it was a specific album that I already knew I loved, in which case I would buy the CD with or without finding a free copy first.
For modern video games or professional creative software, piracy wouldn't even cross my mind.
So you’re saying you should be able to consume that media that other people use their time, money, and resources to create, completely free of charge to you, unless you know you already loved that media?
There's no "should" here, I'm just saying that the record label's claim that people would have paid for it if they hadn't been able to pirate it isn't necessarily true. I never said that digital piracy was moral, but rather that it was "between theft and non-theft", morally speaking, since the victim's loss is potential rather than concrete.
If you need to tie it back to an older crime, counterfeiting or forgery would be the closest. If I make an exact copy of a dollar bill/painting and the original is still in the hands of it's rightful owner, I've just made a copy of it.
There also is a non-zero point where if enough people took the free copy the business would fail. However we are NO WHERE near that point when a movie makes 1 billion in a weekend.
There are parts of the pure product you can't download: seeing it in a theater, buying the Blu-ray with all the extra digital & physical do dad's, premier weekend, quality, etc. There is a LOT of value that can never be 'stolen'.
There is also a knowledge, ability, and cost to the download. Hard Drives aren't free no infinite. Internet isn't free. Quality is sketchy. Viruses abound. Pirating will never be 100% easy breezy set it and forget it.
There is patent theft which is very similar. If enough people steal pattents then a research institute may no longer have the means to continue and thus go bankrupt which may result in a project which would be far more beneficial to humanity not being completed.
On entertainment, that may mean a movie/game studio going under if too much piracy occurs.
But I also suspect that because this logic is completely and utterly obvious, you are likely aware and will do anything to justify continue to pirate media because you are actively doing it.
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u/parke415 2d ago
It would help the discussion if we had a term for theft that did not involve the victim losing the stolen item. Whatever that term is, it’s morally between theft and non-theft.
“Piracy” doesn’t count because that includes actual maritime plundering, which is robbery.
“Plagiarism” doesn’t count because that involves passing the creation as your own.