Poll: Piracy is legal

[Compatriot Block]

You know what, I couldn't care less about whether piracy is technically stealing or not. What really, truly irks me is that by downloading for free what I pay for, they are piggybacking on me and everyone else who paid. Essentially, I am paying for their game, because if nobody actually spent money on the games, the developers wouldn't make them.

That is why people should be angry. Pirates are using everyone else to fund their gaming, because if everyone pirates like they do, then the games stop shipping.

 

[Entitled]

people pirating is a thing...IT IS NOT OK just because a bunch of people do it, they put the burden on people who actually pay for their shit

Of course I'm not saying that the same ones should always pirate, and the same ones should always buy everything.

 

[Entitled]

You know what, I couldn't care less about whether piracy is technically stealing or not. What really, truly irks me is that by downloading for free what I pay for, they are piggybacking on me and everyone else who paid. Essentially, I am paying for their game, because if nobody actually spent money on the games, the developers wouldn't make them.

That is why people should be angry. Pirates are using everyone else to fund their gaming, because if everyone pirates like they do, then the games stop shipping.

Again, that only works if you assume that it's the same people who always pirating everything, and the same people always buying everything, as opposed to most people buying most of their games, and they also feel relaxed about occasionally also pirating some when they are broke, or want to play something that isn't sold anymore, or unsure about a game that doesn't have a demo, etc, usual justifications.

There are very few people who are hardcore pirates, or who are obsessed with ALWAYS following copyright laws.

Edit: Besides, isn't that also true for LEGALLY getting a copy without paying? Like borrowing from a friend? Do you feel angry about people who borrow stuff piggybacking on the industry?

Or people who only buy things after a price cut? They also harm the industry why not paying a full price, aren't thes?

 

[Tsun Tzu]

Because it bears repeating, apparently...

Copyright Infringement =/= Theft

The former involves a copy of the original. The latter involves the original being taken.

Different concepts.

As for the morality question, refer to melbourne's post on page 3. The guy's spot on.

 

[spartan231490]

Stealing is stealing, you can put whatever pretty label or justification on it you want, it's still morally wrong. And yes, it is stealing.

 

[bastardofmelbourne]

If people download a pirated game, they are taking and playing without paying, something that doesn't belong to them.

Taking something without paying, taking something that isn't yours, is theft.

Piracy = Theft.

I just made Hulk impotent.

Let's look at an example definition of theft from a jurisdiction I'm familiar with. The basic distinction is the same in the US, the UK and Australia. This is from the Crimes Act 1958 (VIC).

Spoiler

Crimes Act 1958 - SECT 72
Basic definition of theft

72. Basic definition of theft

(1) A person steals if he dishonestly appropriates property belonging to
another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it.

(2) A person who steals is guilty of theft; and "thief" shall be construed
accordingly.

This is the Commonwealth definition of basic copyright infringement, from the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth).

Spoiler

COPYRIGHT ACT 1968 - SECT 36
Infringement by doing acts comprised in the copyright

(1) Subject to this Act, the copyright in a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work is infringed by a person who, not being the owner of the copyright, and without the licence of the owner of the copyright, does in Australia, or authorizes the doing in Australia of, any act comprised in the copyright.
(1A) In determining, for the purposes of subsection (1), whether or not a person has authorised the doing in Australia of any act comprised in the copyright in a work, without the licence of the owner of the copyright, the matters that must be taken into account include the following:

(a) the extent (if any) of the person's power to prevent the doing of the act concerned;

(b) the nature of any relationship existing between the person and the person who did the act concerned;

(c) whether the person took any reasonable steps to prevent or avoid the doing of the act, including whether the person complied with any relevant industry codes of practice.

Can you see how those are two different things?

The definition of theft under which you operate is legally inaccurate. "Taking something without paying" is not the definition of theft. You know why? Because that would criminalise any transaction where one party did not pay the other party, including all forms of charitable donation.

Do yourself a favour. Go get the local criminal statute for the state you live in (I'm assuming you're American.) Look up the definition of theft. Then go get the Copyright Act 1976 (US), which is the US federal copyright statute. Look up its defintion of copyright, and its definition of infringement.

Then, get an apple and an orange, shuffle them around a table, and see if you can tell them apart afterwards. Because if you can do that, you can tell that copyright infringement and theft aren't the same thing.

Thank you for your fucking time.

 

[bastardofmelbourne]

so theres absolutly nothing wrong with it then?

its still imoral

Sure, whatever. It's bad and only bad people do it. It's still not theft.

Stealing is stealing, you can put whatever pretty label or justification on it you want, it's still morally wrong. And yes, it is stealing.

Listen. You haven't read any of my posts above, and you don't know anything about the law, so I'll not get angry at you.

But I want you to ask yourself - is the legal definition of a specific offence a "pretty label?" Do you think that these definitions exist because lawyers and judges need to dress up crimes in fancy words to make themselves feel pretty? Do you honestly think that the majestic engine of the common law serves the same purpose as a pink tutu on a chihuahua?

These definitions exist because crimes need to be clearly defined. You can't just haul a guy before a judge and say he did something bad, and have the judge go "Yeap, he looks like a bad person" and throw him in jail for twenty years.

When you talk about copyright infringement, you're talking about whether something is or isn't legal. It is a legal inquiry. It needs a legal definition, one that is distinct from other legal definitions, such as those for theft. If you think that copyright infringement is theft, you are wrong. You are factually wrong. You are provably wrong. If you tried to haul a pirate to court and told the judge he's a thief, the judge would ask you to prove theft. He won't accept it if you accuse a guy of theft and prove he committed copyright infringement. He won't accept it if you say he did a really bad thing, your honour, for reals, he's such an asshole. He's only going to accept proof of theft.

Personally I blame the ads. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmZm8vNHBSU]

 

[dolgion]

I find the whole piracy discussion kind of backwards.

To answer the OT: piracy is wrong from a morality point of view. A person worked hard to create something that is worthwhile enough to take without giving back to the person. Because the persons livelihood depends on earning money, it is just mean to enjoy their work with them not getting any return on it.

This is the problem: people work to earn money to be able to fulfill their requirements for living. Especially people who create something and only get their reward once the product is done take a big risk. What if nobody wants it after all, then all the work was for nothing (from a financial POV).

Piracy is a bad thing to do in the sense that it actually damages the creators of products. On the other hand, piracy though is a form of sharing things that are abundant. Games, movies, music are all digital goods, and they can be copied and multiplied infinitely. Therefore, they should logically be all free. After all, money was invented because the goods that were traded weren't abundant. If back then humans had infinite access to all things, food, water, shelter etc, then there wouldn't be a need for trade in the first place. Everybody would have everything.

Digital goods are such a good. Everybody can share anything online. Because our economic system is designed with the idea that all goods are finite in the first place, digital goods just don't fit with it, and that's why companies are trying to artificially limit access to their produced digital goods. After all, money must be made to provide for the people who create these goods, and they need money because they live in a system where money is needed to be able to live.

The questions shouldn't be whether piracy is good. The question should really be how we can rethink our system to get rid of the need for money altogether, in other words, to make our physical goods as abundant as our digital goods.

Impossible?

If we applied EXISTING technologies without regard for the existing economic structures (stock market, corporations etc), without trying to cater to the already obsolete system we have, we could provide food and shelter for all people in the world. Engineers and scientists have already figured out much of what is needed to really propel us into the future, but cannot realize much of it because a lot of these projects need big funding and nobody wants to invest into something that isn't meant to return a profit.

 

[Entitled]

Personally I blame the ads. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmZm8vNHBSU]

It's not the ads. Its the issue that I tried to discuss in this thread: how to separate legal and moral definitions.

Theft ALWAYS had an obvious established definition in every civilization. Hammurabi and Moses wrote about theft. It is a part of the natural law.

Even if I would be talking about a caveman taking away another caveman's axe, you could say that he committed something that is "morally theft", even if they didn't have laws, because theft is an universal concept that always existed, even when we didn't properly enforce it, just like equality, or liberty. (E.g.: Slaves were alawys morally free, even if some shitty coutries didn't acknowledge it.)

You can't do the same with copyright infringement, which reeks of being defined by the letter of the law. Did the caveman copying another caveman's drawing, commit something that was "morally copyright infringement"?

Which is the truly moral length of copyright, 25 years, 50 years, or 95 years?

It's easier for them to just say that copying is the same thing as theft.

 

[dolgion]

Personally I blame the ads. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmZm8vNHBSU]

It's not the ads. Its the issue that I tried to discuss in this thread: how to separate legal and moral definitions.

Theft ALWAYS had an obvious established definition in every civilization. Hammurabi and Moses wrote about theft. It is a part of the natural law.

Even if I would be talking about a caveman taking away another caveman's axe, you could say that he committed something that is "morally theft", even if they didn't have laws, because theft is an universal concept that always existed, even when we didn't properly enforce it, just like equality, or liberty. (E.g.: Slaves were alawys morally free, even if some shitty coutries didn't acknowledge it.)

You can't do the same with copyright infringement, which reeks of being defined by the letter of the law. Did the caveman copying another caveman's drawing, commit something that was "morally copyright infringement"?

Which is the truly moral length of copyright, 25 years, 50 years, or 95 years?

It's easier for them to just say that copying is the same thing as theft.

I personally believe that the whole idea of law is kind of laughable. Law is just an arbitrary set of rules some people agreed on, yet anybody can break the law. A law that can be broken isn't any use at all really. Sure, there is enforcement of law, and one function of it is to scare people off from breaking the law in the first place, but it's still an inherently flawed concept. And we constantly have to update our laws, constantly patching a system that is already broken from the very beginning. You know a law that nobody can break?

Newtons Laws.

Nature is the only ruleset we need to comply with, because otherwise we'd die. That for me is the bottom line. Everything else is a question of morality. We don't need laws, we need to cultivate morality and values. Once people truly understand that it isn't nice to kill someone else, or to take away their possession, then there's no need to try to force anything upon them. I don't need a law that says: don't kill other people, because I don't have any desire to kill somebody.

This sense of morality (which can of course be different from culture to culture) is ingrained into people from the moment they're born, taught by parents and environment. If you want a better society, don't make laws, but improve the world we live in, and people will turn out better. Got off on a tangent there, sorry, but was compelled to give my 2 cent.

 

[Some_weirdGuy]

I almost don't know what to say - it's fundamentally a legal question. Asking whether piracy is "okay" is basically asking "is it legal?" Copyright infringement is a legal concept with a legal definition. Morality never really comes into it.

It's not like, say, lying, which can sometimes be illegal (such as with fraud) but which is fundamentally a moral question. Copyright infringement only exists because the law has created intellectual property rights to be infringed. It has zero basis in moral principles. Even "giving the creator their due" isn't a foundation principle for copyright law - if it was, the rights would be inalienable like they are in Germany, meaning the creator can never sell them away.

Basically, it's a bad thing because the law says so, not because people actually think it's a bad thing. I don't think I've ever met anyone face-to-face who sincerely thought pirates were bad people.

You've probably already been called out on this(so don't feel as though you have to make a response if you don't want to... maybe just look at the last line), but:
I entirely disagree. In my opinion piracy is first and foremost a moral question, and further a question of respect. Something being 'okay' and something being legal are not the same question at all.

Someone has put hard work and effort into creating the thing that is being pirated. Others are then gaining from that hard work, without having made payment. That is why the 'piracy is stealing' opinion is so wide spread, despite (as you have said) it not actually being stealing in the traditional sense but rather strictly 'copyright infringement' instead*, but mortally speaking it is just like stealing, in that(as mentioned) you are receiving a service or item without the due payment in exchange.

*(personally, I feel piracy is more comparable to counterfeiting. I'd even say it is the direct digital translation of counterfeiting.)

 

[CaptainKoala]

People like to talk about how it's okay because the media companies are stuck in a broken business model, or that it's okay because they're all billionaires anyways. But morally speaking, none of this matters. If it causes them to lose $1 it's just as morally wrong as if it loses them $10,000.

The bottom line is this: At the end of the day, you have acquired something for free that you otherwise would have had to pay for. And no weak rationalization can change that.

I think piracy is acceptable in cases where legal copies simply can't be found anywhere, and when developers openly say they don't care if people torrent their games. These are the exceptions though, not the rule.

 

[CaptainKoala]

I almost don't know what to say - it's fundamentally a legal question. Asking whether piracy is "okay" is basically asking "is it legal?" Copyright infringement is a legal concept with a legal definition. Morality never really comes into it.

It's not like, say, lying, which can sometimes be illegal (such as with fraud) but which is fundamentally a moral question. Copyright infringement only exists because the law has created intellectual property rights to be infringed. It has zero basis in moral principles. Even "giving the creator their due" isn't a foundation principle for copyright law - if it was, the rights would be inalienable like they are in Germany, meaning the creator can never sell them away.

Basically, it's a bad thing because the law says so, not because people actually think it's a bad thing. I don't think I've ever met anyone face-to-face who sincerely thought pirates were bad people.

You've probably already been called out on this(so don't feel as though you have to make a response if you won't ant to), but:
I entirely disagree. In my opinion piracy is first and foremost a moral question, and further a question of respect. Something being 'okay' and something being legal are not the same question at all.

Someone has put hard work and effort into creating the thing that is being pirated. Others are then gaining from that hard work, without having made payment. That is why the 'piracy is stealing' opinion is so wide spread, despite (as you have said) it not actually being stealing in the traditional sense but rather strictly 'copyright infringement' instead*, but mortally speaking it is just like stealing, in that(as mentioned) you are receiving a service or item without the due payment in exchange.

*(personally, I feel piracy is more comparable to counterfeiting. I'd even say it is the direct digital translation of counterfeiting.)

Counterfeiting involves making fake copies of something, while piracy just takes something an distributes exact copes for free in indefinite amounts.

 

[bastardofmelbourne]

snip

Adopting a moral definition of theft for the purposes of comparison to copyright infringement is thoroughly problematic. Even if you accept that theft is illegal because it's wrong (Yanks call this malum in se), copyright infringement is only wrong because it's illegal (malum prohibitum).

It's even possible to argue that theft isn't malum in se, because theft can't exist without a legal conception of property ownership. You have to have the concept of property rights before you can talk about people violating them.

This is why the discussion shouldn't be a moral one. It's problematic, a lot of it is grounded in vague principles and community perceptions of morality instead of firm legal definitions, and it's thoroughly impractical - even if you do some rhetorical gymnastics and twist the "moral" definition of theft so that it covers something as unrelated as copyright infringement, that's not going to convince a fucking judge.

 

[chikusho]

I've defended piracy so many times in the past that I'm not expecting to make a difference by doing it yet again here, but even if Piracy was as big of a problem as most of the opposers seem to believe, the organizations working _against_ piracy are without a doubt more harmful to society as a whole than piracy will _ever_ be.
On the sole merit of lessening the iron grip of the legislative process that IP and copyright owners (note: not creators) piracy should not only be decriminalized, it should be encouraged.

 

[Some_weirdGuy]

Counterfeiting involves making fake copies of something, while piracy just takes something an distributes exact copes for free in indefinite amounts.

What denotes a digital(or even non-digital) item as a 'fake' copy as opposed to a... 'non-fake' copy?
If you mean that the only distinguishing factor between a 'fake' and a 'real' item is the accuracy of it's replication, then I think I see a bit of a flaw in your assertion.

 

[Entitled]

Someone has put hard work and effort into creating the thing that is being pirated. Others are then gaining from that hard work, without having made payment.

This, on it's own, isn't like stealing, or even considered immoral.

That's just the definition of a positive externality [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality#Positive]

As long as a product would have been made either way, extra people getting a benefit from it is normally considered a good thing.

 

[Killclaw Kilrathi]

If it was legal, I think most people would also consider it morally okay- same as what's happening with weed currently.

how the fuck is it ok?

I make a game called chicken hunters...I put effort into it, I put the game up for sale......everyone loves the game...and majority of people pirate the game

I have no money no chicken hunters 2...great going guys!!!

or scenario 2

I make chicken hunters 2 under publisher FC (fat cats), chicken hunters 2 is a game with a sizable budget....people love chicken hunters 2 but alot of people pirate

FC have alot of money....but they look at the stats and the "disapointing" returns for chicken hunters 2 and shut down my studio

GREAT GOING GUYS!!!

people who advocate piracy seem to lack basic logic

I definitely agree with what you're saying here, if a content creator is specifically against piracy then I'd say to leave their stuff the heck alone.

The one caveat I'd put forward is when a content creator says that they don't mind piracy. I remember this happening for a game that was banned in Australia due to the lack of an R18 rating, the developer basically said "well, we can't legally make a profit there so all you aussies just go ahead and pirate the game". There is also a pro-pirate attitude among a lot of music artists, many of them have said that they make their money from concerts and just like to see their music getting out there rather than squeezing out the few cents per album sale their record contract allows them. Of course, you could argue that the music is technically the property of the record label at that point, so there's still plenty of argument there.

 

[Entitled]

The bottom line is this: At the end of the day, you have acquired something for free that you otherwise would have had to pay for. And no weak rationalization can change that.

No, and I don't see why anyone would want to change that.

See my above post about positive externalities. On it's own, "getting more stuff for free instead of having to pay for it", is AWESOME.

You would need to add something to that bottom line about how only the cases of piracy that make the publisher poorer are wrong, or something like that.

 

[bastardofmelbourne]

You've probably already been called out on this

No, I haven't.

I entirely disagree. In my opinion piracy is first and foremost a moral question, and further a question of respect. Something being 'okay' and something being legal are not the same question at all.

Someone has put hard work and effort into creating the thing that is being pirated. Others are then gaining from that hard work, without having made payment. That is why the 'piracy is stealing' opinion is so wide spread, despite (as you have said) it not actually being stealing in the traditional sense but rather strictly 'copyright infringement' instead*, but mortally speaking it is just like stealing, in that(as mentioned) you are receiving a service or item without the due payment in exchange.

*(personally, I feel piracy is more comparable to counterfeiting. I'd even say it is the direct digital translation of counterfeiting.)

I can't force you to approach the problem like I do. I wrote a large post [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.398484-Poll-Piracy-is-legal?page=3#16305994] above about why approaching piracy as a moral question is problematic; I don't know if you've read it, as it's effectively my response to this point.

If you have read it, and you don't accept it, I can't do much more to sway your mind.