Ads, not "adds."
Don't Make Me Steal
91–100 of 143 posts
Re: Don't Make Me Steal
#92If I could watch content on Hulu, Netflix or other in Linux and I didn't want to throw myself in front of the lunatic-driven University bus, I'd be happy. TPB -> "The Italian Job" + 3 hours = me happy. There is NO legal alternative for me. No, I'm not walking 30 miles to Best Buy to waste $30 on a DVD that won't play in my computer that doesn't have a DVD drive. And I don't consider running Win7 in a VM to be reasona…
"There is NO legal alternative for me." Yes there is. You choose not to use them because they are inconvenient. You are not entitled to dl a copy of the movie instead.
Sigh, I am not interested in an argument.
I did NOT come here to justify my actions, piracy or to complain and nothing in my post can be construed as an attempt to do so. I came to point out that watching a movie, legally, in Linux is a complete disaster, to the point that it's not worth the hassle for me. I understand it's breaking the law. I'd rather break the law than go through the nightmare of obtaining the movie legally.
How am I supposed to watch "The Italian Job" legally in Linux? I'm listening, because I would happily pay for it rather than torrent it.
Re: Don't Make Me Steal
#93I really don't like the "don't make me steal" attitude. It undermines a good society. The creators of this campaign decided that "Purchase should not exceed the cinema price." Really? What if we did that for, say, organic bread. "I won't buy organic bread unless it's x3 or less than the cost of the generic white bread. If it is more expensive, I'm entitled to steal it." Sorry folks, you're entitled to not buy it, not…
The way the "manifesto" is worded does unfortunately reek of entitlement, but they do make a valid point. If you see their bullet points as rows in a product comparison table between legal movie distribution channels, most of them score badly on most of those points, whereas piracy ticks nearly all of them. (It would of course be a fairer comparison if there was a row for "is legal".) They're making the point that le…
Yes! Copying things without paying for them is in fact more consumer-friendly than any conceivable paid option.
Re: Don't Make Me Steal
#94This seems like 'I want a store like the iTunes Music Store for videos' that doesn't have the movie-company BS that the actual iTunes movie store does. (i.e. DRM free, has absolutely everything, doesn't cost a ridiculous amount for TV shows, etc) They'd need to add on 'simultaneous worldwide availability' and Linux compatibility, maybe subscriptions, and the subtitles stuff, but it'd get close to satisfying this manifesto.
I hope that a store like this exists soon. But given the track record of the studios, it's not likely that they'll become sane anytime soon.
Re: Don't Make Me Steal
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
I must be completely insane then, because I don't see stealing as wrong because it deprives the owner of their property, I see it as wrong because you're taking something you don't own on your own terms, not the terms of the person who owns it. If John the shop owner wants to sell bread for $10/loaf and you take it for free, that's immoral because it was his bread and he wanted $10 for it. If Tony the musician wants…
In fact, you can look at most real physical theft in the same terms and see how silly this "copying, not stealing" argument is. If I steal a $10 loaf of bread, how have I harmed the baker? Most people would say, "you took $10 worth of goods from the baker". But of course you didn't, says the pirate: you took $0.50 worth of flour and water and yeast from the baker, $0.20 in energy costs, and $2.00 in labor costs; you…
$10.00 or $2.70, it's a moot point to the issue at hand. The baker has lost something.
If I have the same pattern of bits on my hard drive that a movie studio has on theirs, the movie studio has lost $0.00.
That's the fundamental difference between piracy and theft. If you want to assert that we, as a society, have made an agreement to limit people's freedom to configure their bits as they see fit in order to encourage content creation, that's fine. But make that argument, don't try to conflate configuring my hard drive in a specific way with depriving you of an object you own.
Re: Don't Make Me Steal
#96As a former classifieds phone operator, please note:
"ad free", not "adds free".
Please. I beg you.
Re: Don't Make Me Steal
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you take $10 from your mom, your mom no longer has that $10. When you pay money to buy a magazine, the shop no longer has that magazine and you no longer have the money. Taking in the usual sense is moving . But pirates insist that they can "take" without depriving the owner of anything. That's copying , which is a different kind of taking. It gets even more complicated if somebody first purchases a legitimate c…
My usage of "take" is insignificant, it's just a word in my argument. You can "take help" you can "take ideas" and they're not physical. Please don't focus on the word "take", instead the actual argument :|
Your actual argument depends on the sense of the word "take" that you use.
(a) It is a well-established norm in any modern society that it's immoral to take (move) something without permission.
(b) It is not well-established -- or at least, pirates would like to say that it's controversial -- that it's immoral to take (copy) something without permission.
(c) It's even less well-established that it's immoral to take (purchase) something with permission and then crack the DRM or produce further copies to share with other people.
Nobody disagrees with you about (a). But you're extrapolating that view to (b) and (c), and that part of the argument seems to hinge upon an equivocation of the different senses of "take".
Content producers have a shaky argument because they want to use the "moving" sense of the word "take" to argue that (b) is immoral, while using something like the "copying" sense of the word "take" to argue that (c) is immoral. (If ownership of the movie was actually moved when you purchased it, it's none of their business what you do with the DVD you now own!) Don't make the same mistake of equivocation. This is not an argument that piracy is OK. I'm just trying to point out that there are good and bad ways to argue against piracy.
Re: Don't Make Me Steal
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
I must be completely insane then, because I don't see stealing as wrong because it deprives the owner of their property, I see it as wrong because you're taking something you don't own on your own terms, not the terms of the person who owns it. If John the shop owner wants to sell bread for $10/loaf and you take it for free, that's immoral because it was his bread and he wanted $10 for it. If Tony the musician wants…
In fact, you can look at most real physical theft in the same terms and see how silly this "copying, not stealing" argument is. If I steal a $10 loaf of bread, how have I harmed the baker? Most people would say, "you took $10 worth of goods from the baker". But of course you didn't, says the pirate: you took $0.50 worth of flour and water and yeast from the baker, $0.20 in energy costs, and $2.00 in labor costs; you…
I don't think this is really a common pro-piracy argument. Most of the arguments I see stop at "it costs them nothing for me to copy it" and completely ignore the lost sale side of things. Those that address the lost sale aspect just say that they wouldn't have payed for it either way.
Personally, I sit somewhere in between. I consider piracy immoral but not as bad as actual theft.
Re: Don't Make Me Steal
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
"There is NO legal alternative for me." Yes there is. You choose not to use them because they are inconvenient. You are not entitled to dl a copy of the movie instead.
Sigh, I am not interested in an argument. I did NOT come here to justify my actions, piracy or to complain and nothing in my post can be construed as an attempt to do so. I came to point out that watching a movie, legally, in Linux is a complete disaster, to the point that it's not worth the hassle for me. I understand it's breaking the law. I'd rather break the law than go through the nightmare of obtaining the movi…
I think the problem that I (and presumably the others in this thread) had with your point was two-fold:
1) your tone and choice of language implied entitlement;
2) if not a defence of piracy, did not add a great deal to the conversation.
So what if watching movies in Linux is a complete disaster for you? If you agree that you are not entitled to be able to do this and do not believe that it justifies piracy, it's not clear why this is any more relevant than the fact you can't play back movies on your toaster.
Re: Don't Make Me Steal
#100I really don't like the "don't make me steal" attitude. It undermines a good society. The creators of this campaign decided that "Purchase should not exceed the cinema price." Really? What if we did that for, say, organic bread. "I won't buy organic bread unless it's x3 or less than the cost of the generic white bread. If it is more expensive, I'm entitled to steal it." Sorry folks, you're entitled to not buy it, not…
"Sorry folks, you're entitled to not buy it, not to steal it." EXACTLY. Yes, downloading a movie isn't exactly stealing, but it's still taking something without permission and it should be frowned upon just as much as stealing is. If a person pirates a movie they're taking something without reimbursing the rights owner with what they want. People aren't judged for stealing because it costs the store owner money, they…
Re: immorality of theft.
I would counter that it isn't necessarily always morally wrong to steal. Suppose I need some medicine to survive and I have neither the money for it nor the ability to get the money legally. I would argue that since I will die if I don't get the medicine, it's then morally acceptable to either steal the money necessary to purchase it or to outright steal the medicine itself, provided doing so doesn't have the foreseeable consequence of putting the victim of my theft into a similar life-or-death situation.
Would you agree that in this one situation, theft can be morally justified? If not, then say there were 10, 100, or 1000 people in need of the medicine; is it OK to steal to get it then? If not, is there a particular N such that it's OK to steal to save N people? It's just not that simple, and saying "stealing is immoral" doesn't cut it (IMO) as an argument against piracy, even if you buy the argument that piracy == stealing.