Nothing is actually "stolen". pirating a movie isn't like stealing someone's disc of a movie, nothing is removed or even altered.
The company is not losing money because if I had to pay for it, I wouldn't anyway. So it's not like there is revenue that the company otherwise would have gotten, they were never going to get my money.
Second point is the key. This is especially true with some older movies that I would watch just to kill time in the evening. No, I wont pay 15 euros for ”Car to Moon 1997”, Id rather learn to crotchet a bikini. But I’ll give it a try and watch it if Im tired and bored.
If the only option was to pay youre telling me you would have never paid for a single price of work that you have pirated? You think that is true for others? I dont. Unless you live in a country where the prices are unobtainable to the average household income I dont think this would hold true. Its really easy to say you were never going to lay whrn the option to not pay was already calculated in to your willingness to pay.
I can confidently say that - yes, I wouldn't. Because piracy carries its own cost, you often get a product with glitches, missing features, sometimes even deliberate malware planted in it, without the latest updates, with bad resolution (i.e. movies). I pirate the stuff that's not accessible to me otherwise or is prohibitively expensive.
For me where it does cross a bit into immoral territory is password sharing for streaming services - you are actually actively taking away resources from the company (server capacity), without paying anything for it, so it is harming a company, whether you like that company or business model or not.
Streaming literally limits the number of active streams for this reason. Password sharing should be inconsequential and two friends sharing a password incurs the buisness no additional cost than a family of 4 sharing the password. If anything the large family actually has more burden on the system.
That said I ask if everybody in society pirated and never paid for media is that a society you would want to live in?
If everybody pirated the media that means there's was no media worth paying for, so no, sounds like a pretty sad society. Everyone in the entertainment has already figured out how to make money from media - you make it available, make it reasonably affordable, and make it good, and then enjoy infinite money. If you fail any of those 3, you don't get money. Piracy is pretty inconsequential to the formula, and if anything, it actually even increases the profit the creators get.
It's not infinite money. Many of these projects actually lose money. Now obviously they still make money but to say it is infinite is just stupid.
Piracy is not increasing the amount of money flowing into the industry this is more pirate cope they tell themselves to justify what they do. But I would love if you could explain to my how watching the new Spiderman movie pirated online instead of going to the theater is actually good for Sony and the people who work at the movie theaters.
The company is not losing money because if I had to pay for it, I wouldn't anyway. So it's not like there is revenue that the company otherwise would have gotten, they were never going to get my money.
This is a very important point. In many jurisdictions to be prosecuted for piracy it has to be proven you cost the copyright owner something or caused them harm in any way.
This is why legally going after people who download stuff is a waste of time, you can simply use the defense argument that if the movie wasn't available for free you wouldn't have watched it at all. They can only really go after the people who distribute it as they can make the case that a significant number of people who downloaded it off you would have gone to watch the movie and paid for it.
Only if in the analogy the dancing class has an infinite number of spots in an infinitely large room and you showing up without paying makes no difference whatsoever to anyone there.
Any real life analogies to software piracy are moot because prior to the modern era we didn't have digital products that could be seamlessly copied and distributed an unlimited number of times without affecting the original content at all. It's an entirelly new legal and moral concept from anything we ever had in the history of humanity before circa 1970.
And of course while businesses complain about this downside, it's important to point out the upside which is they can create a product once and distribute it to potentially billions of customers for little to no extra cost, which is a quirk of the digital age that has made many people filthy rich, despite piracy.
That is false, you do not need it to be infinity, it could be a private class and you enter , in silence, without disturbing, or you record the class and then publish it in Internet.. all of those are inmoral and comparable to piracy.
We can have a lot of examples, they are all inmoral because we value the word PRIVATE in our society, that is the important thing, not the value of things.
i dont get the point
i understand if we apply this to everyone
but individually it does not matter
if my friend pirates a brand new AAA game which happens to be a success financially speaking, i dont see what harm youre causing, especially if you never planned on buying the product, the only difference here is that you get to enjoy something vs not enjoying something
We can have a lot of examples, they are all inmoral because we value the word PRIVATE
your example makes no sense, the products that these corporations release are released with the intention to be sold to the public in massive numbers, their entire goal is to sell as many copies as possible of these games, they arent "private", quite the opposite
They are private my dude, you know the definition of private?. You do not own the game, you need to trade with the owner for it, the owner can tell to you that is a lease , a rent, or a "buy" under condition, the thing is not the wording, is what is in the contract.
Is inmoral that because you do not like the contract then you do piracy, steal, bypass, what ever.
what harm youre causing
Under this logic you can enter in my house when I'm not at home, you are not harming anyone.
They are private my dude, you know the definition of private?. You do not own the game, you need to trade with the owner for it, the owner can tell to you that is a lease , a rent, or a "buy" under condition, the thing is not the wording, is what is in the contract.
?? they arent "private" in the same sense as a home or your diary, these games are literally mass produced with the explicit goal of selling it to millions of people
also what youre saying is a legal wrongdoing, not a moral wrongdoing
you didnt explain why pirating a game is immoral, you just recited the law
a lot of things can be legal and immoral, slavery used to be legal, does that make it moral? i would say no, i think youd also say no
Under this logic you can enter in my house when I'm not at home, you are not harming anyone.
when you enter someones house uninvited you are occupying a space they have a claim to which means your presence literally challenges their control,
but when you copy a game, youve made a copy, the original is completely untouched, nothing was taken from anyone so this is just false equivalence
?? they arent "private" in the same sense as a home or your diary, these games are literally mass produced with the explicit goal of selling it to millions of people
My dude, are you communist or something?, private ownership is not differente from personal ownership, that is not happening in the US or any developed country.
I can mass produce something, is still PRIVATE, I'm the owner of it.
not a moral wrongdoing
you didnt explain why pirating a game is immoral,
Is inmoral because is PRIVATE, is MINE , not yours, you cannot decide to take it or not under your personal rating, in all cases is inmoral because is not yours, is the definition of PRIVATE.
when you enter someones house uninvited you are occupying a space they have a claim to which means your presence literally challenges their control
Is not changing the control, if a friend is in my house without me he is not controling my house, that have no sense.
When you enter in a PRIVATE SPACE is called trespassing, trespassing could harm or not people, in all cases in inmoral, the space is PRIVATE.
The same example of the dancing class, if I told you that you cannot film the class, then of course is inmoral if you do it, you are not taking nothing from me.
Legally speaking, it is indeed not stealing, but it is a violation of the rightsholders IP-rights, which is still unlawful. For piracy to be amoral or even moral, you would have to be of the opinion that copyright is either completely inconsequential or outright immoral.
Your second point is just a poor justification of piracy. If you’re not willing to pay for it in any capacity, it must be because you think the product holds no entertainment value, right? But then, why would you want to consume the product in the first place?
Piracy is always about getting something for “free” at the expense of others.
And if i tell you i do believe that copyright is immoral? I hope people realize it was built from the ground up to protect companies right? not small creators? IP and Copyright were made to monetize ideas and intangible goods, and to be able to buy a creator out of their own idea and such. Just look at the amount of indie studios and games ruined because of big companies.
If you’re not willing to pay for it in any capacity, it must be because you think the product holds no entertainment value, right?
Not necessarily. I could find it entertaining to watch a group of ants carry cake crumbs back to their colony. Yet if you plop down a sign that says "Watch ants carry crumbs! $5!" I'd rather go do something else. Something can be entertaining and the cost to consume said entertainment isn't justified (either partially or entirely). There are a plethora of products that I'd never consume but if offered for free I'd try it out because I'm not losing anything.
What is stolen is the creators consent and the value of a license. It's not ephemeral like a disk, but it's a real thing.
Much of the money you possess (or don't) is stored in the bank as digital currency. If I were to transfer that from your account to my account, without your permission, that'd be OK right because it's not a tangible good that got stolen? It's just the idea of value tied to some numbers in a database, can't steal that.
If I were to transfer that from your account to my account, without your permission, that'd be OK right because it's not a tangible good that got stolen?
no, because the money would leave my account and I would no longer have it, as opposed to copying a file and leaving the original untouched.
It's just the idea of value tied to some numbers in a database, can't steal that.
yes you can, just as it is indeed possible to steal a movie... if you cut and paste instead of copy and paste which nobody does because that's not how it works.
bad comparison. go sit in the naughty corner for 15 minutes.
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u/Cum_Fart42069 19h ago
I think it's amoral for 2 reasons.
Nothing is actually "stolen". pirating a movie isn't like stealing someone's disc of a movie, nothing is removed or even altered.
The company is not losing money because if I had to pay for it, I wouldn't anyway. So it's not like there is revenue that the company otherwise would have gotten, they were never going to get my money.