81–90 of 153 posts
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The OPs argument is bad/stupid, but there is a real argument to be made here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26028392
Your comment is bad/stupid. You are bringing nothing to this discussion.
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Purely devil's advocate would be someone along the lines of -- just because it isn't for sale now doesn't mean it might never be. Pirating it now deprives the owner of some amount of ability to make money from it in the future. Pretty flimsy, imo.
I've upvoted you because this point needs to be countered and stopped. Something that was pirated does NOT equal a lost sale. I might enjoy Charlie Chaplin films, I would never pay for the ability to watch them. I don't feel it is worth my money. It doesn't matter if it becomes available at some-point in the future, I won't ever pay for it. If anti-piracy measures were 100% effective and reasonable and I couldn't get…
This is a common argument, but I think it's more complicated than a blanket yes or no.
If I sell 1000 copies of a novel (or a CD or a movie or whatever), then strictly speaking, my revenue isn't affected by how many pirated copies exist. I get paid for 1000 copies whether there are zero pirated copies or a million.
However, that doesn't mean pirated copies aren't lost revenue in a real sense; it just means it's effectively impossible to measure that lost revenue. Some of those people would never have paid for their copy at all; some might not have even been able to find it legally. Some, though, undoubtedly did have the money and did enjoy the work, they just decided it was cheaper not to pay for it. If enough people take that route, it does affect my revenue, in that I am making less than I would if those people were paying.
And it's easy to talk ourselves into believing that's always okay, with what you called self-serving rhetoric: "really, this just hurts big companies, not little ones or individual creators"; "oh, there are enough other people paying for it, we can afford it"; "I enjoy this, just not enough to pay for it." When we're talking specifically about Charlie Chaplin, that latter seems like a pretty easy call, since the vast majority of his filmography is over 70 years old and much of it is in the public domain. If, however, we say "I might enjoy Robert Downey Jr. films, but I would never pay for the ability to watch them," this may not seem so cut and tried.
I wish we had a better term than "intellectual property", because I genuinely think "property" makes people focus on physical representation as the thing they are paying for: shoplifting a DVD and pirating a movie are obviously different, and many people who've done the latter would never think of doing the former. But in both cases, what you're really interested in, what you're actually paying for, is the content.
I get that there's lots of gray areas: the content may not be available legally in your area; it may not legally be available at all; you may already own the movie on Blu-Ray and find it easier to download a torrent of it to make a good digital copy than to go through the hassle of ripping it. But any argument which, at the end of the day, reduces to "I wanna have this content, I just don't wanna pay for it" is, well... pretty weak.
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Do you have a right to everyone's IP who doesn't fit your expectations for reasonable access and price?
Personally I don't think that anything intangible can be property. And whenever I purchase something digital I consider the act to be a donation and/or payment for a service of delivery.
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Do you have a right to everyone's IP who doesn't fit your expectations for reasonable access and price?
Legally, no. Ethically...maybe? The United States does have a long tradition of allowing grey areas when rightsholders become unreasonable. Oftentimes these wind up being formalized as right-of-ways, easements, or other access rights. In the case of online streaming, its clear that the rightsholders are consolidated and engaged in monopolistic, anti-consumer behavior. Piracy is a natural response to that type of beha…
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Personally I don't think that anything intangible can be property. And whenever I purchase something digital I consider the act to be a donation and/or payment for a service of delivery.
It’s an interesting attitude. Of course, if everyone thought that way most of the the things we buy digitally would never be made in the first place.
Overall I don't think that we would be significantly worse off, especially now, when it's technically possible for general public to engage in croudfunding.
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I completely agree, but some parents might not want their kids to watch old stuff. A content advisory is a good middle ground, since it doesn't censor the past while giving the streaming service a free pass.
Or parents could pay more attention to what their children are watching. Just like when all we had was antenna TVs.
Like antenna TV programming used to be - guaranteed to be inoffesive so you don't have to watch crap kids like to watch.
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Your comment is bad/stupid. You are bringing nothing to this discussion.
I regret saying stupid, too abrasive and I didn't intend it as a personal attack. My comment links to my actual argument.
I admitted my reasoning is not moralistically ethical or law abiding.
My argument is that piracy is there for a reason. There was a huge dip in torrent usage at the dawn of Netflix, for a reason. The convenience of Netflix outweighed 'cost' of piracy. Now piracy is back up, why?
Thats the reality of the world we are living in.
The argument you linked is great and it makes sense. And shows issues with copyright etc. that is my long time belief.
But the reality is that I pirate things when its more convenient to me. As a lot of people too. Saying otherwise is lying. And arguing how CP is bad and damaging doesn't change anything, because disney and company will uphold it no matter what.
Similar shenanigans are the reason I cancelled Disney+. I’ll pay a monthly fee for your entire back library. Otherwise, no thanks. Also, what’s the ethical issue with pirating content that is not for sale? I’d love to see a copyright overhaul that formalized abandonware and extended it to back catalogs of film and music. That way, people could legally torrent everything currently missing from these streaming platform…
Copyright is often closely tied with the broader concept of authors' rights in European law. An author's work is closely tied to their reputation. Therefore, the author has an inherent right to some degree of control over how their work is exhibited or distributed, because their reputation could be harmed if the work was presented in the wrong way.
Just because these rights are not explicitly recognized by U.S. law doesn't mean they're not moral rights.
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It’s an interesting attitude. Of course, if everyone thought that way most of the the things we buy digitally would never be made in the first place.
It would be a very different world, for sure. Public funding and patronage would play a significantly larger role than they do now, works produced non-commercially would have bigger prominence. It's harder to say what would happen in absence of patent laws. Higher reliance on trade secrets? Non-competes in every employment contracts? Overall I don't think that we would be significantly worse off, especially now, when…
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Ethics? I don't care too much if mouse company gets more money for their empire from me or not. Lets be real, that money more less goes to people that have nothing to do with people that create shows/content etc. But thats beside the point, I don't care much about it. I am adult, I earn money and at this point in my life my time IS worth money. If the effort/cost of watching a show it greater than firing up torrents,…
"Ethical/lawful or not I don't care" -me_me_me Parody? I'm not sure. Seems like an attitude I'm relatively happy isn't super common in society. If I make a book, I don't "owe you an effort" just cause you don't want to make it available in a format you'd like to consume. And that doesn't give you the right to steal it from me. Now certainly everyone should live under a set of guidelines, no one should be certain effo…
But yes, if you think you can keep things off the internet just because you said so, you've signed up for a hopeless battle. It is up to IP holders to make good choices regarding making their content available conveniently at a fair price. If not, they've made their bed and have to lie in it.