5 ms·

Legality aside, whether sharing copyrighted information is amoral or not is determined by one's own values. Some people, myself included, see a person's right-t

by gatmne 9y ago

Legality aside, whether sharing copyrighted information is amoral or not is determined by one's own values. Some people, myself included, see a person's right-to-share to be far more important to humanity than the authors ability to employ an ill-suited business model to profit off his or her work. There are many ways to generate profit other than to infringe on others' right to share. Humanity does not owe you a successful business model, and certainly not at the expense of it's right to share. > What gives you the right to take someone else's painstakingly created artistic creation and give it away for free to thousands of people, depriving them of the exclusive right to sell their own work. Users sharing copyrighted work does nothing to prevent authors from profiting off their work. Conflating sharing and business is what got us in this mess in the first place.

msc1 9y ago
Think about 3rd world countries. I'm relatively better off than my peers (2 cars, own a house etc.) but I can no way afford Hex Rays IDA Pro, Burp Site Professional, Navicat Premium or JetBrains and this list goes on... They cost more than my two or three months of rent. My parents are both medical doctors and their medical books are not affordable if they were sold in US prices but they have 3rd world print editions and they can legally buy these copies. Software vendors have to adapt to tthis too. Gaming companies already adapted this and I've never pirated any games since Steam. I'm a paying netflix, spotify customer because they are priced for the country they operate and as you can guess I'm not torrenting music or movies either. Internet is global but purchasing power is not. Ethically, I see no problem in torrenting. Human knowledge is "on the shoulders of giants" and in philosophical perspective -I'm not advocating this- even copyright is on shaky grounds (Property is theft! - Pierre-Joseph Proudhon)
- omio 9y ago
  Wow that is a name I haven't read or heard in years. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, father of modern anarchism.
- freeflight 9y ago
  > Gaming companies already adapted this and I've never pirated any games since Steam. The first to adopt this, very successfully, had actually been Apple with their approach to selling mp3s. While everybody was still busy trying to sell overpriced physical albums, complaining about the "digital thievery", Apple took this as an opportunity with iTunes. iTunes made buying music digitally as convenient as it was pirating it, at the same time iTunes allowed customers to only buy specific songs (at reasonable prices), instead of forcing them to buy whole albums. Valve did something similar for gaming with Steam, that's true, but it took Steam way longer to get there than it did take iTunes. Imho Steam has also regressed quite a bit in that regard, it used to be a place for good deals but increasingly feels like a platform to shovel around shovelware for badges and trading cards.
  - slantyyz 9y ago
    >> Imho Steam has also regressed quite a bit in that regard, it used to be a place for good deals but increasingly feels like a platform to shovel around shovelware for badges and trading cards. Well in fairness to Steam, app stores in general (including those run by Apple, MS, and Google) are platforms for shovelware.
  - drewmol 9y ago
    Apple is an interesting case. While they may have flirted with 'legal' music as a revenue stream, the big bucks came from adding utility and simplicity to the ubiquitous collections of 'stolen' music. A very small subset of iPods were filled up with the plus +$10K cost of 'legal' music. No strong opinion, but it's a somewhat unique situation in the economics of IP.
    - freeflight 9y ago
      > A very small subset of iPods were filled up with the plus +$10K cost of 'legal' music. But they were actually filled with some legal music, prior to iTunes there wasn't really "one unified place" for purchasing digital music, most mp3's came from physical CD's people ripped privately. A couple of flatrate services popped up before/around the same time, but these mostly turned out to be illegal offerings, so it was mostly iTunes which stuck around in the beginning and formed the market. > While they may have flirted with 'legal' music as a revenue stream They still have impressive market shares in digital music distribution, they have started to lose ground to streaming services like Spotify and music labels finally adapting to the digital age but afaik iTunes was and still is a major player in digital music distribution.
slantyyz 9y ago
>> Legality aside, whether sharing copyrighted information is amoral or not is determined by one's own values. This can even be a gray area for content creators who care about copyright, but only for their own profession. I regularly see stories of famous musicians improperly lifting photographers' work for their marketing or social media efforts. I also see professional photographers using unlicensed music for slide shows. It's really quite bizarre to see content creators fighting each other for not respecting each other's copyrights when they themselves should know better.

by gatmne 9y ago

msc1 9y ago

Think about 3rd world countries. I'm relatively better off than my peers (2 cars, own a house etc.) but I can no way afford Hex Rays IDA Pro, Burp Site Professional, Navicat Premium or JetBrains and this list goes on... They cost more than my two or three months of rent. My parents are both medical doctors and their medical books are not affordable if they were sold in US prices but they have 3rd world print editions and they can legally buy these copies. Software vendors have to adapt to tthis too. Gaming companies already adapted this and I've never pirated any games since Steam. I'm a paying netflix, spotify customer because they are priced for the country they operate and as you can guess I'm not torrenting music or movies either. Internet is global but purchasing power is not. Ethically, I see no problem in torrenting. Human knowledge is "on the shoulders of giants" and in philosophical perspective -I'm not advocating this- even copyright is on shaky grounds (Property is theft! - Pierre-Joseph Proudhon)

omio 9y ago
Wow that is a name I haven't read or heard in years. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, father of modern anarchism.
freeflight 9y ago
> Gaming companies already adapted this and I've never pirated any games since Steam. The first to adopt this, very successfully, had actually been Apple with their approach to selling mp3s. While everybody was still busy trying to sell overpriced physical albums, complaining about the "digital thievery", Apple took this as an opportunity with iTunes. iTunes made buying music digitally as convenient as it was pirating it, at the same time iTunes allowed customers to only buy specific songs (at reasonable prices), instead of forcing them to buy whole albums. Valve did something similar for gaming with Steam, that's true, but it took Steam way longer to get there than it did take iTunes. Imho Steam has also regressed quite a bit in that regard, it used to be a place for good deals but increasingly feels like a platform to shovel around shovelware for badges and trading cards.
- slantyyz 9y ago
  >> Imho Steam has also regressed quite a bit in that regard, it used to be a place for good deals but increasingly feels like a platform to shovel around shovelware for badges and trading cards. Well in fairness to Steam, app stores in general (including those run by Apple, MS, and Google) are platforms for shovelware.
- drewmol 9y ago
  Apple is an interesting case. While they may have flirted with 'legal' music as a revenue stream, the big bucks came from adding utility and simplicity to the ubiquitous collections of 'stolen' music. A very small subset of iPods were filled up with the plus +$10K cost of 'legal' music. No strong opinion, but it's a somewhat unique situation in the economics of IP.
  - freeflight 9y ago
    > A very small subset of iPods were filled up with the plus +$10K cost of 'legal' music. But they were actually filled with some legal music, prior to iTunes there wasn't really "one unified place" for purchasing digital music, most mp3's came from physical CD's people ripped privately. A couple of flatrate services popped up before/around the same time, but these mostly turned out to be illegal offerings, so it was mostly iTunes which stuck around in the beginning and formed the market. > While they may have flirted with 'legal' music as a revenue stream They still have impressive market shares in digital music distribution, they have started to lose ground to streaming services like Spotify and music labels finally adapting to the digital age but afaik iTunes was and still is a major player in digital music distribution.

slantyyz 9y ago

>> Legality aside, whether sharing copyrighted information is amoral or not is determined by one's own values. This can even be a gray area for content creators who care about copyright, but only for their own profession. I regularly see stories of famous musicians improperly lifting photographers' work for their marketing or social media efforts. I also see professional photographers using unlicensed music for slide shows. It's really quite bizarre to see content creators fighting each other for not respecting each other's copyrights when they themselves should know better.