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No, it’s not like stealing a physical item from a store.
I'd argue stealing physical items from massive corporations is also morally acceptable. If you shoplift from a small mom & pop store, you're actively hurting your community, however, if you shoplift from Wal-Mart, you're actively hurting an entity which is hurting your community, therefore helping your community.
Shoplifting from Walmart hurts my knees because the boss won't believe that our onhand numbers are wrong and makes me check high and low before I can nil pick it 🥲
This isn't an ethical argument against shoplifting btw, this is an ethical argument in favor of nuking Walmart
Staling sustinence from societal cancer is practically an immune response.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. If buying isn't owning, then pirating can't be stealing.
perhaps the only ethical consumption under capitalism is that which denies capitalists their profit.
I mean...if the movie is good you should support it. Vote with your wallet.
I mean…if the movie is good you should support it
What is 'it'? The movie is a published work, it can't be financially supported. Who is being supported with the money you pay?
Vote with your wallet.
Unfortunately, consumer boycott (and conversely, support) usually isn't an effective strategy at this scale you're talking about. Unless you and all your friends are voting with a few thousand dollars, it's hardly going to make a dent in the numbers.
It is always morally acceptable?
Morality is, literally, subjective. There is no universal answer to that question.
I personally consider anything being sold by a distributor to be fair game, no questions asked. If I pay for mainstream music, films or games, most of the time, zero of that money goes to the workers who created those artworks. It just makes rich owners richer, because they legally own rights. I would go as far as to say it's morally wrong to pay for those things, it's not neutral, it's supporting a cycle of abuse at your own expense. So that's my perspective on your 'giant corporations' question.
Digital copying isn't stealing, unfortunately, because those giant companies deserve to have their hoard of capital expropriated.
I would like to suggest an alternate perspective, that digital media be beholden to protocols not platforms.
In other words lets focus on the drivers of competition...most evidence suggests that piracy goes down in response to easily accessible and affordable market conditions.
most evidence suggests that piracy goes down in response to easily accessible and affordable market conditions.
The assholes know this too. We're about due for another round of deshitifcation, just long enough to restore complacency.
I pirate to save money =]
I do since it's a better service
Given that no one makes a fuss about it when corporations do the stealing, I think so.
If "buying" is not owning, then "piracy" is not stealing.
The number of examples of media becoming unreachable to paying consumers keeps growing.
Warner Brothers (Max) is the greatest example of this. Years of content from Cartoon Network just disappeared, leaving the consumer no legal avenue to enjoy some of their favorite shows.
I do not advocate for piracy. I advocate for archiving.
I do not advocate for piracy. I advocate for archiving.
Exactly. And if the assholes make it illegal for librarians, well then yo ho ho.
Piracy is a response to various kinds of market failure, inequality.
There is no "stealing from corporations"
It's as easy as that
Stealing a physical item from a giant corporate store is also always morally acceptable.
Having power neurologically suppresses empathy. Therefor resources controlled by the powerful will on average be used more harmfully. Taking resources from the powerful reduces total harm done.
You will use a loaf of bread less harmfully than Walmart will use the profit from it.
Stealing a physical item from a giant corporate store is also always morally acceptable.
not really, it makes the store lock everything up behind plexiglass creating more friction for paying customers too.
Of course, theft wouldn't happen nearly as much if no one was desperate the survive, but even then there'd still be entitled assholes that want even more.
PIRACY IS BAD AND ONLY BAD PEOPLE DO IT.
I’ve never pirated anything in my whole life!
Good thing you said that, I was about to send some agents to have a "nice chat" with you.
If they keep raising my food subscription I'm gonna start pirating from supermarkets too
No but i dont care
I've been pirating for years. I just don't want to pay for things
It is always morally preferrable to pirate things made by giant corporations
Fixed It For You.
Regardless of what is regarded as a crime against the state, it is wrongdoing against the public to support corporations that seek to extract more wealth than value they produce.
Intellectual property rights were a (very) temporary monopoly to give creators an incentive to create in order to build a robust public domain.
Copyrights, patents and trademarks no longer do that. So charging for content is now rent-seeking
Corporations, their share holders and the plutocrats who own them pull wealth out of the economy by hoarding it. The whenever you buy from anything but directly from the creator, you are reducing the wealth in the economy since your money goes straight into Scrooge McDuck's swimming coffers.
And our public domain only contains stuff from a century ago. Steamboat Willie became public domain just a year or two ago. Copyright holders and courts even assert all content should be owned and licensed, including SCOTUS. (Though the US Supreme Court is a traitor to the United States and its constitution.)
Pirate everything. Steal from companies for they have already stolen from you.
When you download music online for free and prevent the company from making a profit off of a creative work by the artist, that they prevented from making a profit & royalties, is that wrong? Doubtful. You can always send the artist money directly if you want to support them.
the DMCA doesn't protect the artists or any of the singers, it protects the shitty record labels and the money that the executives at those companies get
They promised they would go out of business if I pirated their content, and that was a lie.
My moral is always on match with that of the company so in most cases everything is acceptable.
People try to boil these things down to incredibly simplistic rules in an effort to justify what they’ve already decided they’re going to do.
I am pro piracy, as I imagine virtually everyone on this community is. But I also think people get way too reductionist because that is easier than engaging with the nuances of what it means to “steal” or “pirate” or when we are or aren’t hurting a creator.
I think the pros vastly outweigh the cons, the “victims” are few and far between due to it being so rare/situational as to make it ok to functionally treat it like there are none, and I also think all the people arguing they are “doing media preservation” who don’t even know what a proper 3-2-1 backup is are full of shit lol. I also think people need to accept the fact they just want free shit sometimes and trying to dress up their motivations/sense of entitlement to free media with high minded arguments about sticking it to corporations or whatever is disingenuous - just own the decision!
I use my server because it is convenient and because I don’t want my kids being visually assaulted and manipulated every time they turn on a tv. I used to watch one of them visibly become panicked when all the tiles of a streaming service would pop up in front of him, it was just so overwhelming. I went a solid seven or eight years without the high seas because there was a time when streaming services were reasonably priced, convenient, and not dominated by ads. Now that that is no longer the case, I have gone back to my server. Simple as that.
I don’t mind paying for a service, I don’t even mind the occasional advertisement in my life. But what we have right now is absolutely ridiculous and easily justifies so many reasons for pirating.
All of this is to say you’re not gonna find people here who disagree with your decision to pirate. But you’re also not going to find some airtight philosophical argument that works 100% of the time. You have to consider the ethical implications of your actions in your day-to-day life, there are no simple rules to avoid that.
Rage bait. Yawn.
"stealing" a digital copy of a movie, tv show or a game is like if the item you're stealing from a store is infinitely copyable.
What if it's a physical Blu-ray? Those are infinitely copyable.
physical media is a physical it's a finite item. digital media can be copied infinitely
the reason why physical media is getting harder and harder to find is because the copyright nazis can't control it. If they want to memory-hole a scene, they can't change the content of that blu-ray disc with the original version on it
Can you further expand on why you think it's bad? I'm generally curious.
Personally I don't really care too much about whether it's moral or not. I pirate when I feel like it and don't when I don't feel like it. I also pay for some things that I pirated before and enjoyed as long as it isn't too expensive.
Big agree, also now I want to rewatch Sabrina the Teenage Witch lol
Why do you have to take a moral stance?
Do it because it’s cool
