I'm the best judge of what I will like, but you'd have to be a moron not to take some value from others' opinions to make an informed guess yourself. Humans have this great ability to imagine how good or bad something will be before we do it ourselves. The reason there isn't liver and onions ice cream isn't because someone whipped it up and tried it only to find it disgusting. We can imagine it being as gross as it almost certainly is and skip all the work of having to make and taste it. The "fair, moral" approach is to buy or not buy on the terms of the content owner, not on whatever selfish action you think is best for you. You said, ^Your thoughts on "better, fairer, more morally justifiable" is completely based on what you think is best for you, not on an actual, mutually agreed upon transaction. There is no moral justification when one party has no choice in the transaction. As it is, the content owners are saying, "no, you can't have this for free" and your response is, "alright, I'll take it then." Right now your approach is, "pay what I think it's worth after consumption." The reverse corollary would be if you watched the film, then the content owner judged how much you liked it and then took that amount from your bank account without asking. If you hate the current system then fully boycott it. Don't steal the value of their work and call it a protest against the system. Even if you steal a film and then promote it, you're still stealing it. Deciding for yourself that it's okay because you bought Star Wars gummies at the supermarket and told your friends, "see it, it's good" is you justifying your actions to yourself, not making yourself square for the theft.
Wow, that is the best excuse for pirating I've seen yet! Might have to use that one myself when I reach the pearly gates.
Or in the courtroom, "You see, judge, this list of itemized receipts clearly adds up to the value of the fine for piracy. So if you'd just deduct those charges from my fine we could all just go home and be happy. Also, note this marketing fee I've written and sent to Disney for all the 'free' advertising I've done for them. I'd like that amount deducted from my penalty as they've refused to pay me."
Naaa the judges would be long gone. After they've been through every person that ripped a CD or DVD they'd retire being too tired to deal with anyone for copyright infringement. No one would then want to be a judge with the knowledge of what awaited them, the legal system would collapse. We would be forced to start with a new kind of judge, enticed by flying bikes......
Is it stealing though? To me it's copying a non-rival, non-excludable good. The reason piracy is such a "problem" these days is because a technology called the internet was invented, with aspirations of the egalitarian sharing of information baked in. That was when the old business model (and it is just a business model) for media distribution was made obsolete. It made sense before - Ephemeral information required a physical medium to house and transport it, so there was an inherent cost associated - but the internet's nullification of reproduction and distribution costs have rendered the business model out-dated, and useless. This is the information age. We no longer need the apparatus of Hollywood to make movies; They're dirt-cheap to make. We no longer need logistics and distribution coordination, we can click a button instead. Looking at the near future, physical props will be dirt-cheap as personal fabrication marches toward ubiquity. We should embrace that, rather than continue to parrot obsolete propaganda that seeks to consolidate power, wealth and cultural influence in a single geographic area. Production values might go down, sure, but we get more original stories rather than the bankable templates Hollywood gives us now.
Good tv costs a lot to make. House of cards is $4.6mil per episode, the Pacific and band of brothers both saw between $18million + per episode. The list goes on and on in truth. Destiny cost $500mil to make as games go. GTA5 was $265 mil and that does not even include the PC costs. To say things are getting cheaper is a rediculus argument for piracy. Most of the low budget tv show is the regular crap that gets shown on Dave 400 times Storage Wars seems to have about 5 shows. Films the best low budget films are Chinese martial arts flicks which did not cost a lot to make. The low budget Hollywood crap is pretty bad.
Yeh, I bet God has Piracy right up there on his list of naughties. Maybe that's why the Catholic Church has choir-boy fiddling so low on its list - 'cos it's been bumped down so far by digital piracy. What the law says is irrelevant. I'm quite happy I've not ripped Star Wars off and am most definitely a net contributor to the franchise. There's a clear justification for what I'm doing, but you are apparently blinded by your black and white goggles. This is all you needed to say, thanks. I prefer to take the guessing out of it. See below:
Poor Teenager yes. Not a poor teenager no. I want the next generation of game devs to be excited about making games and to experience as much creativity as they can get. Games can be expensive for youngsters.
This is a red herring if ever I saw one. Everything he says is valid, and fine you know it; that's why the substance of your argument is: So you are above the law, by your own appointment. That doesn't make the law irrelevant; it just makes you extremely arrogant. I'm sure there are those of us who at the very least are willing to acknowledge that piracy is unlawful and punishable by law. If you were jailed for piracy, would you still consider the law irrelevant? I doubt it. But that's the other side of the coin - piracy generally goes unpunished, so you consider the law irrelevant only because there are no consequences for your actions. It's copyright infringement, simply put. The stealing-vs-copying argument is nothing more than a smokescreen (see above); they are both equally illegal, so the differentiation is utterly futile.
I think if Piracy was more closely monitored and the penalty harsher you would see a different approach than most take. Movie piracy don't really get the thing about watching low bit rate cams but each there own. Enough screeners as the scene calls them are more common now they are still rare. Game piracy on PC at least will be over inside 2-3 years is the general feeling with either every game online perm or using an exception that can't be broken fast enough to make it worthwhile. If they can't crack a game inside of the first month most people who want to play it will have played it those that haven't were never going to purchase anyway. The lack of demos is really not a relivent argument for big budget games. Tv shows is a bigger issue as long as the shows are shown in America months before a European release piracy will continue to happen.
While I'm happy to admit that copyright infringement is unlawful it simply isn't the case that it's punishable by law (well not in the UK at least). The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 only contains a very small number of criminal offences and none of them cover the act of downloading copies of copyrighted material or small scale uploading, such as someone using bit torrent to obtain the odd movie or game. The copyright holder could make a civil claim against you, but you aren't going to end up facing criminal charges or being jailed. Even if they were equally illegal (which they aren't) it doesn't make the differentiation futile. If it were then we wouldn't have two different laws to deal with it.
There's a difference between criminal charges, and something being punishable by law. Civil law is still law, and if you're sued successfully for copyright infringement, you've been punished by the law. I love the CDPA '88. That and the '77 PA are the bread-and-butter of my work
Oh no, I get that. However, it appeared from the context of LennyRhys's comment that he was referring to criminal matters and it was that I was referring to. I probably should've been clearer about that.
- can it ever be justified, not 'is it against the law'? Slavery was legal once ffs. Whether it is legal is irrelevant to whether it can be justified. Legality doesn't make things absolutely right; illegality doesn't make things absolutely wrong. And the stealing vs. copying issue is not a red herring at all. It's fundamental to every discussion of this topic and to dismiss or ignore it puts a flashing neon light over your argument.
It doesn't help that businesses / industries can pay to have laws changed in their favour through political "donation" or lobbying Copyright in the US at least is the lifetime of the artist plus 70 years. An absolute ridiculous length that only helps businesses, does nothing for society and the extension of 70 years does nothing for the creator. Lawful does not equal just.
I get what you're saying but you're being inconsistent with yourself. The law provides a point of reference that allows us to qualify something as "absolutely" right or wrong, without going deep into meta-ethics and the neverending argument of moral relativism vs. moral absolutism (done that before on this forum). I suppose we have to agree on what "justifiable" actually means, otherwise the discussion is pointless. I figured that the law would be a good place to start, but you seem to think otherwise. The copying vs stealing red herring is fundamental to people who wish to justify piracy. Of all the straws that can be grasped, it's the biggest one. Stealing is appropriating something that's not rightfully yours. Copying (pirating) is appropriating something that's not rightfully yours. When you strip the argument of all the sh!te that gets thrown in there, it's really very simple. And for the record, I made it pretty clear that I would never justify piracy even though I have pirated in the past. I would deem it understandable in exceptional cases, but never defensible.
What happens when you don't agree with the laws definition of what's "rightfully" yours though? If you ripped your CD collection to MP3's those MP3's aren't rightfully yours according to the law, at least i think that's where we're back to after much flipping and flopping. At times it's necessary to break laws and push back at what maybe seen as an unjust law.
Unfortunately the sh!te to which you refer is the difference between: 1) Someone being left without an entity that they own (stealing), and; 2) Someone being in no different a position than they would have been - even though someone else has benefited (piracy). Which are in fact two very different situations.
The laws on MP3s pretty much caused the end of cd sales in the younger generation. Why pay twice when you can just pay for it once. Streaming then killed both.
How about 2) Somebody being left without the profit they would have if their "entity" had been rightfully purchased. Like I said, the sh!te can take many forms, but the focus of this argument is ALWAYS on the circumstances surrounding the crime and not the crime itself.
