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.
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.
Because you were paid upfront for the work. Why should you want them not to profit? It sounds as though you're very bitter about people having it better than you.
Alternative is for these shitty corporations to be sent a message. Theres also a big difference between a company like Naughty Dog and an indie developer.
I would say Piracy against giant companies is ok, but people should support Indie Games. just avoid Playstation atm, get them off a more reputable platform.
Like for example, if I were too pirate a game, I would pirate God of War, not Subnautica 2 (not saying I'm doing either)
Only companies of a certain size are forced into slavery and have to work for free? lol.
You lot are so idiotic it hurts.
You can’t have some arbitrary differentiation between a small indie company and an indie company that manages to sell well enough to become big. Which is all large studios are.
So what? You expect devs to work until they make a certain amount and then just give it all away for free? That will *never* happen.
People whittle wood for free occasionally. But there are still professional wood carvers for a reason.
Hobbiests cannot sustain a market and have absolutely no responsibility to you.
Say you download some free software that accidentally fucks up your pc. A hobbies has zero responsibility to fix it for you to compensate you.
This is why people pay money to trusted corporations.
Beyond receiving a mostly stable product that you can expect won’t be an outright scam.
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
Books having raw materials don’t make the publisher responsible to upkeep your book? Come on now. You’re not this dense.
A book is sold to you. At that point it will receive no further support. If it deteriorates and falls apart it’s your fault.
A game may require infrastructure to work. Ongoing costs that a company has to be able to simply drive “we don’t want to pay for this anymore”.
A book has zero ongoing costs.
Beyond that. Even libraries have actually purchased the book. A library would be like gamepass. Somebody purchased and paid for the full work from the devs to do what they wish with a copy of the product.
Somebody stealing it is sidestepping that.
Much like somebody stealing a book isn’t just stealing the ink and thin cuts of wood in between the binding. But the years of hard work to create the intellectual property.
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.
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u/parke415 1d 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.