I am ashamed that I hadn’t reasoned this through given all the rubbish digital services have pulled with “purchases” being lies.
I’m the guy who coined this phrase on a Louis Rossmann video and I’m so proud!
Copying information is a nonrivalrous activity. To steal inherently requires the owner to be deprived of a thing, and copying does not deprive an owner of a thing. Copying therefore cannot really in “stealing.”
The industry argument for that is “you’re stealing our potential revenue”. I personally subscribe to one streaming service. That’s it. If what I want to watch isn’t on that, I hoist the anchor and set sail.
The predictable way that video streaming services became content islands and actually a worse user experience than cable really shows how the industry would rather provide worse experience and cash grab than attract more customers naturally. By contrast, I can subscribe to one music service, and listen to literally every artist I can possibly want to. As soon as video streaming does that (at a reasonable price), piracy for video will plummet like it did for music.
you’re stealing our potential revenue
Which is ridiculous. It’s like suing someone for tapping you on the shoulder while you’re deep in thought, claiming that you almost came up with a great invention but their interference meant you lost your train of thought. Therefore, by tapping you on the shoulder, they owe you millions of dollars of lost potential revenue from that invention.
In addition, you have to consider whether they’re morally justified in receiving that revenue. Say someone manages to bribe the government so that they get paid $1 every time someone says “shazam”. If you say “shazam” and don’t pay them, they lose $1 in potential revenue. But, is this potential revenue that they are morally justified in collecting? Copyright law is just as ridiculous as “shazam” law. In both cases the government came up with a rule that allows someone to collect revenue simply because the government says so.
IMO the entertainment industry has ridiculously warped copyright. It used to be that copyright was a 14 year term, renewable for another 14 years if the author was alive. Under that rule, Forrest Gump would just have had its copyright expire. That seems pretty reasonable. It cost them $55 million to produce, and it brought in $678 million, it’s probably mostly done making money for them. Time for their rights to expire, right? Nope, they get to keep their monopoly until 2114. It’s fucking ludicrous.
Copyright is supposed to be a balance between what’s good for people creating something, and the general public. The creator is given a short-term monopoly as an incentive to create, that’s how they benefit. The public benefits because after a short time that creation becomes public. The alternative is no copyright, where creators need to be paid up-front by someone like a patron, and what they create becomes public immediately. The patronage system is responsible for all kinds of magnificent art like most classical music, the ceiling of the Sistine chapel, etc. The argument for copyright is that the patronage system wasn’t good enough, and the public could benefit even more by allowing a short monopoly for the creator. But, with the lobbying of the entertainment cartel, the public benefit is far worse. You now still effectively have the patronage system controlling what art gets made (the entertainment cartel), they then also keep that art from the public for more than a century.
So, yeah. Fuck copyright.
If you didn’t buy something today, you’re stole potential revenue. Louis Vuitton needs that money to survive!
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.
Yeah I’m a huge pirate but I also have subscriptions to publications, buy a bunch of games, buy music and even have almost every release from a few labels, go to concerts as much as I can. It’s not about the money for me at all
We should call it archiving instead of piracy to be honest.
Great idea! It’s up to us to preserve culture, we can’t leave it to those only motivated by profit otherwise cultural history will be lost when it becomes unprofitable.
And since we’re not coordinating, I’d better make sure I preserve the bits of culture important to me.
I assume when the purchase happened there was an agreement that said something like this might happen. If not, then people can sue Sony for the stealing. If so, then trying to argue that this means piracy isn’t stealing is sophomoric at best.
I don’t get why my fellow pirates try so hard to justify what they’re doing. We want something and we don’t want to pay the price for it because it’s either too expensive or too difficult, so we go the cheaper, easier route. And because these are large corporations trying to fuck everyone out of every last dime, we don’t feel guilt about it.
Embrace the reality instead of using twisted logic to try and convince yourself that it’s something else.
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Thank you. I swear some people must be exhausted with all the mental gymnastics they do for self justification.
They say we’ve got it all wrong, it’s not the items we’re stealing. It’s he money they think they should’ve gotten from that item.
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Please drink a verification can.
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
Theft isn’t specific to property, you can steal services too.
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.
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.
If you are using the term theft colloquially
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:
Wage theft is a form of fraud
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.
I guess you can’t steal anything when you just decide to limit the definition of the word.
But if we’re in reality and using the way words are actually defined then yes you can steal something intangible, and no it does not require someone to be deprived of something.
I’m not going to look up every state, but the Penal Code in some states explicitly define theft as:
A person commits an offense if he unlawfully appropriates property with intent to deprive the owner of property.
So, I think it is reasonable to include intent to deprive as part of the definition.
You do understand the difference between penal code and the definition of a word, no? Surely the reason why the two are not at all even slightly interchangeable is plainly clear to anyone of reasonable intelligence.
In the state where I live, the penal code includes the legal definitions of words such as “theft”.
The legal system here does not use a Webster’s dictionary to define words. We use the penal code, code of criminal procedure, traffic code and other legal guidance codes to define the meanings of words used in the law and in official government communications.
These are the definitions that would be used by complainants in cases brought against pirates, if such a case were to be brought. For that reason, I believe these definitions are relevant here.
The penal code necessarily uses incredibly narrow definitions with very specific verbiage.
Using the word steal in OPs title is common use of the word, which aligns with the dictionary definition, they certainly are not quoting a legal definition
Get outta here with this dumb shit.
So much ‘verbal’ diarrahhea to try to make yourself feel better about what you’re doing.
I pirate shit, that is a form a theft. Cope with it or stop doing it.
I was genuinely following your debate points until you got to:
Get outta here with this dumb shit.
I have been kind and polite our entire interaction. I didn’t even initially downvote you. In fact, I initially upvoted you. If I’ve worded something in a manner that implied I was attacking you, my apologies.
I’ve simply offered a reason one might include a specific phrase in their definition. There is no reason to be this angry or insulting in such an innocuous and ultimately meaningless debate.
You made some good points. I feel I made some good points. That should be the end of it, whether we agree or not. There’s no need to bring emotion into our interaction other than support for each other’s valid points.
I don’t think you understand how laws work. Many times, they are required to define terms in order to enforce the law.
Keep reading.
decide to limit the definition of the word.
To what it actually means? Sure.
To selectively focus on one small sliver of the definition of the word, ignoring the full meaning of the word and the context to push your agenda? Smells like propaganda.
The entire definition matters. There’s already a term for “copyright infringement” it’s “copyright infringement”. Pretending it’s theft is just a trick the copyright cartels are using to try to make it seem like a serious crime that has existed for millennia instead of a relatively new rule imposed in the last few centuries by the government, then made ridiculous by the entertainment cartel.
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
Look at the shit sony is apparently intending to do. Total bullshit.
Damn, just say stealing. Thought we were pirates. Not cowards
It’s not theft though. When you steal something you deprive someone else of it.
It’s just copyright infringement. Since copyright is an artificial temporary monopoly granted by the government, it’s pretty different from “theft”.
Are you not depriving someone else of their legal right to control the distribution of copies of their work?
If you don’t drink a verification can, are you depriving Mountain Dew of their legal right to make you drink verification cans? If you don’t enroll in the IOF, are you depriving Israel of its legal right to murder thousands of darker skinned people? Maybe some legal rights are so stupid they shouldn’t exist?
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How did your mind even come up with such bad analogies? Amazing.
So you are too stupid to answer the question? Blocked.
Yes, which is not theft. It’s not murder either. Nor is it blasphemy. It’s just copyright infringement.
When you steal something you deprive someone else of it.
Ok, I was just going off what you said previously.
That’s just one element of theft.
BRB on my way to keep a rental car.
A car can’t be copied effortlessly in the same way digital files can.
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It makes perfect sense, and I agree 100% with this statement. 👍
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Would you rather everyone can just walk into your house and take whatever they want? I for one am quite happy with the rules and morals we keep.
Those flags put up are often there to keep different cultures with different rules apart. It’s not as easy as erasing borders to have a free world. People are too selfish for that.
Sure, governments still steal all the time. Things are definitely not perfect, but that’s not related to someone stealing your lighter.
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Selfishness is part of the human condition. Tribes needed to fight over resources and mark their territory in order to keep the tribe alive. It’s in your instinct.
There have always been borders and territories, and there have always been fights and wars over it.
I don’t really see how your “if you don’t use it” policy applies here, and I also think the problem of this topic is easier than that.
