I am ashamed that I hadn’t reasoned this through given all the rubbish digital services have pulled with “purchases” being lies.
Things got weird when we went digital.
- It’s perfectly okay, reasonable, legal to record a tape off the radio. Yet it’s illegal to download a better copy?
- It’s perfectly okay, reasonable, legal to record a VHS tape off the TV. Yet it’s illegal to download a better copy?
Recording from free to air is legal because of the “time shifting” argument. The show is being broadcast regardless, just because it’s at an inconvenient time for you doesn’t mean you should have to miss it. It’s also worth noting that media producers fought tooth and nail against this.
Piracy is just reverse time shifting. It’s going to be on FTA TV at some point, I’m just making it more convenient to watch now.
Companies pay big bucks for timed exclusivity though. If reverse timeshifting was legal, movie theaters would go bankrupt. I feel like this wouldn’t hold up.
The difference is that grabbing it pre-FTA is also grabbing a perfect copy. The quality may not matter to many of us, but to some it does. And because it matters to some, major copyright holders have started to treat unlicensed exchanges as “competition” from a business PoV (which is a concession from strictly seeing it as crime). So their business strategy is to compete with the unlicensed channels by offering perfect quality media at a price (they hope) people are willing to pay (also in part to avoid the inconvenience and dodgyness of the black market).
FWiW, that’s their take and it’s why they get extra aggressive when the unlicensed version is perfect.
Remember that there were also big campaigns against tape recorders and VCR. They even managed to get VCR vendors to implement a feature that prevents users from skipping ads. So it’s not like it’s simply legal, the media corps were just not as successful in their lobbying as they are today.
I don’t subscribe to the logic but I guess a part of it can be the lossless factor. Quality of pirated digital content is exactly like the original. If you tape something it usually loses quality. So people seem to care less about that kind of piracy. Which is stupid since going for lossy compressed pirated videos is allegedly not less wrong in the face of law.
Let’s get crazier.
Our current favorite show is Bob’s Burgers, it’s a comfort show we fall asleep to. Prior to signing up with real debrid I got tagged for downloading a 2 year old episode.
We pay for Hulu. We pay for YoutubeTV. We have a working OTA antenna (for when the internet goes out).
My math says I have 3 licenses, yet still illegal to download?Well it’s an interesting question. From Hulu’s TOS:
a. License. Within the United States and subject to the terms and conditions in this Agreement, we grant you a limited, personal use, non-transferable, non-assignable, revocable, non-exclusive and non-sublicensable right to do the following:
Install and make non-commercial, personal use of the Services; and stream or temporarily download copyrighted materials, including but not limited to movies, television shows, other entertainment or informational programming, trailers, bonus materials, images, and artwork (collectively, the “Content”) that are available to you from the Services.
This is a license agreement and not an agreement for sale or assignment of any rights in the Content or the Services. The purchase of a license to stream or temporarily download any Content does not create an ownership interest in such Content.
While I’m not a lawyer, I’m gonna guess the lines about a revocable license are intended to cover this. Sites like Hulu rotate their content out, which I’m gonna guess means your license to view their content only extends to what’s in their library at that time. Under fair use, you might be able to argue that you can create a backup copy for your own viewing – it does say “temporarily download,” but doesn’t say you have to download it from them – but legally you’d probably be obligated to delete your copy once Hulu gets rid of it regardless.
Also, the TOS does specify that circumventing their copy protection is a TOS violation. While the DMCA grants certain exceptions to the copy-protection rule for fair use, I don’t think it requires Hulu to continue to serve you content or not revoke your license if you break their TOS. Kinda reminds me of Red Hat’s use of TOS to enforce terms that go above and beyond the GPL. They can’t exactly stop you 100%, but they can refuse to do business with you, which makes it a lot harder.
Not to disparage your reply, because it’s well thought out and written, but doesn’t it seem to you we’re hiding behind legalese?
I want to buy a turkey. I have money. I will visit a farm, pay for the turkey (if the price is agreeable to both parties) and I now own that turkey. I will then do whatever the fuck I want with that turkdy, from raising it as my child, to cooking it for thanksgiving, to cloning it if I have the technology. Sure, I might not be able to return it in some cases. But that’s a living fucking thing, and nobody can tell me how to use it.
Now - I want to buy a movie. I have money. I will go to the cinema, but it’s not playing anymore. I will look for it on TV, but it’s only on one channel, only while I’m at work. I will look for it on the internet and it’s available on one website, where I need to make an account and provide quite a lot of information about me. So I make the account and click through their shitty prompts, pay for the movie and now I can only do one thing: stream it?
Excuse you? Who the fuck are you to tell me how I can enjoy my media? What if I want to make a vynil record and listen to it? What if I want to watch it on my old-timey projector? What if I want to burn a frame of the movie onto my morning toast every day for 2000 years? What if I want to put it in a small baggy tied to my balls while I’m fucking the mom of some movie exec, am I supposed to put the entire laptop in the baggy? How the fuck dare you make that distinction for me? Oh, because your site isn’t granting me the right to buy a movie, but to buy a license to watch that movie in whichever conditions you decide? Great - here’s the thing: I have my own license, which says whenever I pay for something, I use it however the fuck I want, and if you attempt to exert any control over my property or how it is used I will literally stab you and bury you in the woods, because I don’t take kindly to corporate fucks who attempt to instruct me how to use the things I’ve bought. Fuck you, you should’ve read my license when you took my money.
There is no “license” here, my dude. I don’t pay for licenses, regardless of what the website wants to charge for. I pay for a product, or a a service. Let’s not hide behind legalese and let’s just acknowledge that these are scummy practices to ensure the wealth of corporations at the expense of the rights of consumers. And until these types of shady “licenses” to temporarily view THEIR PROPERTY are smacked into the fucking ground by consumer-friendly laws, piracy is the only way to have justice in a system stacked against you.
I’m not saying you should care too much about the TOS, I just found it an interesting question.
Digital piracy is not theft, by definition. Theft requires taking something with the intent to deprive the owner, copying things does not deprive the owner.
Digital piracy is copyright infringement, which (in the vast majority of cases) is not even a crime. It is a civil offense.
Counterpoint:
I wrote a book. Sold maybe 10 copies. If someone “pirated” my book, they are depriving me of the $2 or whatever Kindle Direct pays.
Admittedly not a significant amount, but it does fulfill the definition, imho.
It explicitly doesn’t.
If you have a hard copy book and someone steals it, you’re not only losing out on the potential sale price of the book, but the tangible value you have already paid to produce that copy.
Say the book is $12, you get $2, the publisher gets $5 - the book store buys it for $7, and sells for $12 making $5 profit. If you steal from the book store, they’ve lost a potential profit of $5, but more importantly they’ve actually lost the $7 they already paid for it. This is what theft is about, the value of a possession taken away, not the potential value.
With a digital book, each individual copy costs nothing. It costs something to make the original, but making a copy is free. Thus the only thing you’ve lost is the potential profit, which arguably you wouldn’t get anyway as the person didn’t want to buy from you to begin with - just because they downloaded it for free does not mean they would have paid full price if a free download wasn’t an option.
With theft, you have a tangible loss. With digital piracy, the only loss is opportunity to profit.
Isnt the free market supposed to self-regulate?
If companies can exploit it, why shouldnt we?
No, free market isn’t “supposed” to self regulate. That’s silliness. The only people who say that have no understanding of the concepts.
Regulation is required. Unfortunately with regulatory capture it’s not happening.
I’m all for piracy but I still try to spend money where it morally makes sense to me.
I’ll buy, rent or subscribe to content from actual creators or artists or developers if I know I am supporting their livelihoods or careers.
I’ll pirate content if I decide for myself that the content has already paid for the livelihoods of the creators or workers who produced the material and now it’s only the title holders and corporate interests that are profiting from the ownership and entitlement of controlling the content for commercial reasons only. For me this is mostly just big budget movies, old films and commercially produced music.
To me, anything that’s already paid to help the original artist or creators should be made public. Locking it away and making people pay for the privilege of the content just to make more profit for someone else is piracy itself. This is especially true for films and music that are so old that the original artists and creators and owners are multi millionaires or just no longer exist.
I may be wrong but that is my own personal view of collecting digital content.
Nowadays you can almost reach every creator out there, and we use thousands of content and tools.
How would a financially average person can afford to pay these creators in such a scale?
A dollar at a time … I’m willing to give or donate a dollar, two dollars or even five at a time … if we all did that with a popular creator, they’d easily be able to reach a lot of money in a short time.
I donate to wikipedia, Open Source Software projects I use, firefox, thunderbird, ubuntu (although I am getting skeptical about this one) and other linux projects … on top of that I send funds to creators, app developers and lemmy instances and other fediverse projects and those people who maintain the software, servers and communities in the fediverse
In all, I probably spend about three or four hundred dollars a year or more to these projects … but I know that for the majority of them, the money is going to people that need it … not to people who just want to add to their wealth after never contributing anything of value other than their ownership of someone else’s work.
And if we all did this as users across the board … these small content creators would have more than enough to sustain themselves and continue creating and maintaining these projects
Thank you for this insightful and humble reply, 1 dollar at the time 🙏
“Piracy” has never been stealing except for the boats and parrots kind.
“Piracy isn’t stealing” doesn’t require a qualifier. It’s objectively a separate, lesser crime. That correlation is just the result of effective, aggressive marketing that conflates the two. It was so effective that everyone misremembers the “you wouldn’t steal a car” ad.
Damn, just say stealing. Thought we were pirates. Not cowards
We’re sharing.
Like Robin Hood, but in a pirate ship.
