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If purchasing isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t stealing
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this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Theft isn't specific to property, you can steal services too.
The water is certainly muddy with digital media, but this is just another oversimplified argument.
If you need to do mental gymnastics to feel OK about pirating then...idk find something better than this.
See comments below for more mental gymnastics
People who assert property rights (including limited monopoly rights on intellectual property) are doing mental gymnastics too. We're just used to them, thanks to a century of propaganda after the great depression.
The current state of wealth distribution a century later doesn't seem to carry the promise that capitalism can be fair.
In fact, IP maximalism (Thanks, Walt!) has denied the public a robust public domain, and our courts struggle to do the mental gymnastics to understand why we have a public domain in the first place.
That is to say, the US and EU have totally lost the plot.
Property rights aren't even fair. Big guys assert them, and little guys have them taken away. A good comment: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/5648831
If I were to steal cable, I would be using the cable company's resources to deliver content to my house without paying for it. If I were to set up an inductor under a power line to steal power, I would be depriving the power company of power they could have sold to somebody else without giving them anything in return.
When I torrent something, I don't even put any additional load on Netflix's servers. With their current monetization scheme I don't even make the show's producers any less money.
And when you subscribe to 1 or 2 rotating streaming services and only torrent for personal archiving purposes, you aren't even depriving the streaming services of any revenue.
When you steal cable, you don't deprive the cable company of anything.
It was clear from context what was meant, i.e. torrenting copyrighted content. Let's not be disingenuous about this.
It’s not gymnastics. It’s a pretty easy step. Corporations fuck you over. You fucked them over. No mental gymnast skills required for that
You can't really "steal" services, even though they sometimes call it that. You can access services without authorization, but you're not stealing anything. You can access services you don't have authorization to access and then disrupt people who are authorized to use those services. But, again, not stealing. Just disruption.
Stealing deprives a person of something, copyright infringement and unauthorized access to services don't.
If you hire me to paint your portrait and then don't pay me you have stolen my labour. I have given my time and effort and have not been reimbursed for it.
If you paid me and then gave your neighbour a copy of your portrait then you have not stolen my labour.
I don’t know if any freelancer who has not been paid for their work will agree with you
Freelancers may be upset if they're mistreated, but that doesn't mean they get to declare they were murdered, or that they were raped, or any other crime that didn't occur. Theft has a specific definition, and fraud is not the same thing as theft.
You’re being pedantic in the cases you want while complaining to others when they are differently pedantic. I’m not stooping to pretending to misunderstand due to pedantry.
If you are using the term theft colloquially, which most of us are as this is not a court, legal journal, economic journal, etc. Given that colloquial means the way people generally speak, as we are now, theft has a meaning: taking something that’s not yours through force or trickery. That would mean fraud is a type of theft in this case and not a different thing altogether.
So be a pedant I guess but it’s boring and lazy-brained.
I'm all in favour of people being pedantic, especially in the case of laws.
I'm not, "theft" is misused all the time. It's something that the copyright cartels encourage because they get to pretend that copyright infringement is theft. It's not. We should push back and say theft has to meet certain conditions, and copyright infringement isn't theft. Nor is "wage theft", which is a form of fraud.
By buying into the colloquial definition of "theft" and expanding the scope to be any time someone is inconvenienced, you give the copyright cartels power to make people think copyright infringement is as bad as actual real theft, when it's clearly not.
If you’re not going to use the term in a colloquial context while you are in a colloquial setting, then you need to cite what source you are referencing for your definition. Given that you are talking about laws, then you need to recognize that every place defines things differently according to the law. So which law, where?
Being unnecessarily argumentative and snobby while at the same time not meeting your own standards is ridiculous.
Nah, no need to go to laws, just use a dictionary.
So salary theft by employers is not really theft. Got it.
If it's theft, it's theft. If it's fraud, it's fraud. It could be either. But "wage theft" is not copyright infringement, which is not theft.
Here's what California's Department of Industrial Relations says:
https://www.dir.ca.gov/fraud_prevention/Wage-Theft.htm
Stealing services doesn't necessarily have to do with copyright infringement.
My point is that OP over simplification of theft is not even worth considering, from a legal or personal point of view.
Not really, theft is theft. Fraud is fraud. Just because something feels like theft doesn't make it theft.
You were the one who quoted that wage theft is a form or fraud, so I'm not sure what's your point. Yes, some theft can be fraud... but still theft.
Wage theft isn't theft, it's fraud.
So if someone creates a piece of art and I take a photo of it and sell the photo, or create prints of it, or even just give it give that photo to lots of people, what is that?
Distribution.
Who cares? The point is, it's not theft. The person who had the art still has the art, so it's not theft.
That is an assumption made that the artist still has the original thing that was not paid for. I understand what you’re being pedantic about. I just don’t think you’re right.
What part of that statement suggests that the artist no longer has the original art? As stated, no theft occurred.