5 ms·

Sorry, but being free is the reason 99% of people pirate software. This list is a good spin on putting pirates into a positive light, but the fact of the matter

Sorry, but being free is the reason 99% of people pirate software. This list is a good spin on putting pirates into a positive light, but the fact of the matter, is that they are stealing software and entertainment. None of which are a basic human need or right. What if you could download a Playstation or new TV, and have it materialize in front of you for FREE? This is like arguing that torrents are mostly used for distributing freeware/shareware. Sure there are some, but the rest is illegal software.

throwaway8941 7y ago
They're stealing nothing. It's really hard to take you guys seriously when you talk about "stealing" information.
- overcast 7y ago
  This message is really powerful coming from a throwaway account.
- tzs 7y ago
  "Steal" in English means much more than just taking physical property without legal right and without intention of returning it. Here are several examples of common, correct, usage: • Someone says they do not like cats and have no interest in having one as a pet. A cute stray kitten shows up on their doorstep, they take pity and feed it. They fall in love with it and keep it. They might say that the kitten "stole" their heart. • An actor playing a minor role in a play gives a performance that outshines the performance of the stars. Many would say that the actor "stole" the show. • An employee of a rival company poses as a janitor to gain access to your lab and takes a photo of a whiteboard containing the formula for a chemical that is a trade secret in your manufacturing process. It would be common to say that the rival company "stole" your secret formula. • When crackers gain access to a company's list of customer email addresses, passwords, or credit card numbers, it is commonly said that the data was "stolen". • Alice is Bob's fiancé. Mallory woos Alice without Bob's knowledge. Alice elopes with Mallory. Most would find it acceptable if Bob said that Mallory "stole" his fiancé. • A team that has been behind since the start of the game but wins on a last second improbable play is often said to have "stolen" the game. Outside of court documents, statutes, law review articles, and your final exam in an IP law class, using the word "steal" for willful copyright infringement is common and correct usage.
  - logfromblammo 7y ago
    So... English has a lot of metaphor-based idioms. As copyright infringement is a matter of law, the literal legal context is the only one that matters. I have seen a lot of people desperately trying to make a moral equivalence between theft and copyright infringement on the basis of dictionaries and thesauruses, and it just doesn't fly as an argument. When you copy something, you are not dispossessing the current owner. The only reasonable way to translate theft into the world of intangible goods is as "plagiarism" or "counterfeiting".
  - Karunamon 7y ago
    >using the word "steal" for willful copyright infringement is common and correct usage. The problem here is that we're talking about legal usage at the end of the day. "Copyright infringement" is a legal term, as is "theft", and on this matter, the supreme court already ruled. The short version is that someone made a business pressing and selling Elvis records without the rights to do so, and the license holder tried to get him for theft. SCOTUS basically said no, copyright infringement and theft are not the same thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowling_v._United_States_(1985) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowling_v._United_States_(1985...
kalleboo 7y ago
> What if you could download a Playstation or new TV, and have it materialize in front of you for FREE And in doing so I didn't deprive anyone else of their TV? I would have a TV in every room of my house. If we lived in a post-scarcity world we would be living in the Star Trek utopia. Tea, Earl Gray, Hot. > basic human right IP protections are also not basic human rights. When Ug invented fire, he didn't get an exclusive right to license it out to other Neanderthals for 20 years. Now, I'm not saying that infringing on copyright is right or moral, or that IP protections are wrong, but that it's a valid debate to what extent these things should apply, and what morality is attached. Our laws as they are today are not necessarily an embodiment of what is true morality. Just dismissing it as "stealing is wrong!" is not a strong argument. Most of us agree with taxation, but in a way that's stealing as well.
res0nat0r 7y ago
This is already being shown via an article from yesterday: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190320/07442041832/ironically-too-many-video-streaming-choices-may-drive-users-back-to-piracy.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190320/07442041832/ironi... Everything available everywhere for $12.99/month isn't feasible so folks are going back to piracy, even though signing up for a handful of streaming services one time is easy. Folks just don't want to spend the money per month it would take to watch everything they like. This was always the inevitable outcome of trying to do a la carte TV and approach the original cost of a monthly Comcast bill.
- overcast 7y ago
  "Folks just don't want to spend the money per month it would take to watch everything they like." Exactly my point. I get why they are doing it, but not for the idealistic reasons OP referred to. People will always choose free over paying for something. It has nothing to do with whether they can afford it, or it has DRM, or they want to "try" it before they buy it. Before the internet/torrents, everyone had no problem dumping tons of money into cable. When VHS came on the scene, everyone began copying movies and distributing them.
  - lawl 7y ago
    I don't think it's for idealistic reasons either, but I fully believe piracy is a service problem and not so much free vs paid. I honestly can't remember the last time I pirated a PC game. Steam is just more convenient than pirating a game. And okay, when I was a kid i pirated games because I simply couldn't afford to buy them. I had a spotify subscription for quite a while, but they seem incapable of making a working music player. So now I'm buying albums on bandcamp and 'find' the missing ones online. Netflix here is so garbage, it just flat out made me stop watching movies and TV shows, I just watch youtube/twitch instead these days. As soon as your service is better than piracy, people will pay for it.
    - overcast 7y ago
      So the question is this, if there was two versions of a popular torrent site, equal in every way, except you had to pay for one to get the same content. What percentage of users would choose to use the pay site? I suspect a small fraction.
TallGuyShort 7y ago
I pay for Spotify, but then the week after I bought a new Smart TV Spotify turned off access from the official Spotify app on the new TV, and told me they were revamping it. Years later, I still can't listen to the service I pay for on the device I paid for, and as far as I can tell I've only been lied to about it. But MP3s on a flash drive work great. I used to pay for FloGrappling. First weekend I had it, I wanted to watch 3 fights and they lost sound or partial video for all of them and had spotty service the day of the event. I had the results spoiled for me before I could watch any of them. They refused to refund me any money. YouTube had videos of the same fights, recorded contrary to venue policy, so I just started scouring YouTube a few hours after fights. NBC pays tons of money to get exclusive access to sporting events and then offers inferior coverage. But I can get on a VPN and get it elsewhere, or I can torrent it after the fact. Media companies steal from me all the time through breach of contract and anti-competitive behaviors. I'll pay for the service, and then the minute they break their end of the contract and don't care about it, it's on. I'm not going to spend money suing them or calling for charge-backs every time - someone has been offering me better service for less money this whole time.
- yummypaint 7y ago
  Indeed. Just as their systematic fraud is within the scope of the free market, so is piracy.
  - TallGuyShort 7y ago
    I don't think systematic fraud is within the scope of the free market. One of the few things I think government should provide is a low-overhead way (lower-overheard than what you can do in court today, but maybe that would be abused) to hold people accountable for their word, and I would include things like this in that. But not giving chronic liars my money is close, maybe that's what you meant. But I think the prevalence of piracy is a "smell" about the business model. If people could materialize food in front of them for free without taking that food from someone else that would be amazing. That's literally a Star-Trek-level fantasy about ideal society. As long as the food companies stay in business. In this case, the "companies" are having no problem staying in business. Most money paid for music goes to record companies. The most successful artists make the overwhelming majority of their money from live performance and physical merchandise. So what value are the record companies providing. Distribution? No, independent artists can do that online through SoundCloud or even Spotify. Spotting talent? I think their taste sucks more often than not. I don't get it. I think really the value they provide is with connections to help an artist make it big - so in the big picture I'd say the record companies' customer is actually the artist.
sunstone 7y ago
As a linux user I'm not aware of any software that I want that I would have to pay for. I guess I'm in the 1%.
vorpalhex 7y ago
I've consistently bought something legally, and either lost access (service shut down, copyright issues removed the item from the service, etc) or was unable to actually access it after paying, and got no refund. Nowadays I buy all the media I can (the restriction always being availability, usually region locking but occasionally something being too old), and then I immediately pirate a copy and usually consume the pirated copy since there's no DRM nonsense and I can actually get to my damned content.
- overcast 7y ago
  Your situation is the 1%, and that's awesome. You support the creators, AND you get a copy for yourself that is the most convenient. There is just NO WAY everyone else is doing that though. People have not purchased the thousands of movies they have on their 4TB hard drives.
  - anoncake 7y ago
    I don't think this is a great situation/course of action. - Depending on your jurisdiction, you may break the law anyway and risk trouble. - By buying something that you don't actually use, you effectively donate to a for-profit entity. To me at least, that feels very wrong. Donating directly to the creator would be different but since DRM is involved, you probably pay a middleman. - Even worse: by paying for DRM-infested media, you encourage the use of DRM.
- theK 7y ago
  Ditto, if you compute long enough you are virtually guaranteed to live the frustration of artificial boundaries brought to you by DRM. We really need to get over this topic as a species and head forward towards free, unassailable information access...
matz1 7y ago
Agree. I would 100% steal if by doing so giving me something I want but doesn't cause me any trouble or inconvenient. Software piracy fit very well here.
A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago
That is a rather broad brush you seem to be painting with. But I can only speak for myself. I have disposable income. I haven't pirated in a good while ( gog and steam making it mostly pointless -- though I did uninstall steam recently for other reasons ). One of the game I was considering ( borderlands 3 ) is coming out on epic store with restrictive drm Denuvo. Now I can afford it, but ever since certain company that shall remain nameless decided to rootkit my PC, I became less than forgiving about drm. Hell, torrent may be the only way to have drm free experience on some games. I am not asking for free. I am not making gaming a right, but I expect that as a customer I am treated seriously. I am not. Torrents even out the playing field, cuz clearly no one cares what me as a customer thinks. Torrents put the fear of god back in the executive types.

throwaway8941 7y ago

They're stealing nothing. It's really hard to take you guys seriously when you talk about "stealing" information.

overcast 7y ago
This message is really powerful coming from a throwaway account.
tzs 7y ago
"Steal" in English means much more than just taking physical property without legal right and without intention of returning it. Here are several examples of common, correct, usage: • Someone says they do not like cats and have no interest in having one as a pet. A cute stray kitten shows up on their doorstep, they take pity and feed it. They fall in love with it and keep it. They might say that the kitten "stole" their heart. • An actor playing a minor role in a play gives a performance that outshines the performance of the stars. Many would say that the actor "stole" the show. • An employee of a rival company poses as a janitor to gain access to your lab and takes a photo of a whiteboard containing the formula for a chemical that is a trade secret in your manufacturing process. It would be common to say that the rival company "stole" your secret formula. • When crackers gain access to a company's list of customer email addresses, passwords, or credit card numbers, it is commonly said that the data was "stolen". • Alice is Bob's fiancé. Mallory woos Alice without Bob's knowledge. Alice elopes with Mallory. Most would find it acceptable if Bob said that Mallory "stole" his fiancé. • A team that has been behind since the start of the game but wins on a last second improbable play is often said to have "stolen" the game. Outside of court documents, statutes, law review articles, and your final exam in an IP law class, using the word "steal" for willful copyright infringement is common and correct usage.
- logfromblammo 7y ago
  So... English has a lot of metaphor-based idioms. As copyright infringement is a matter of law, the literal legal context is the only one that matters. I have seen a lot of people desperately trying to make a moral equivalence between theft and copyright infringement on the basis of dictionaries and thesauruses, and it just doesn't fly as an argument. When you copy something, you are not dispossessing the current owner. The only reasonable way to translate theft into the world of intangible goods is as "plagiarism" or "counterfeiting".
- Karunamon 7y ago
  >using the word "steal" for willful copyright infringement is common and correct usage. The problem here is that we're talking about legal usage at the end of the day. "Copyright infringement" is a legal term, as is "theft", and on this matter, the supreme court already ruled. The short version is that someone made a business pressing and selling Elvis records without the rights to do so, and the license holder tried to get him for theft. SCOTUS basically said no, copyright infringement and theft are not the same thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowling_v._United_States_(1985) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowling_v._United_States_(1985...

kalleboo 7y ago

> What if you could download a Playstation or new TV, and have it materialize in front of you for FREE And in doing so I didn't deprive anyone else of their TV? I would have a TV in every room of my house. If we lived in a post-scarcity world we would be living in the Star Trek utopia. Tea, Earl Gray, Hot. > basic human right IP protections are also not basic human rights. When Ug invented fire, he didn't get an exclusive right to license it out to other Neanderthals for 20 years. Now, I'm not saying that infringing on copyright is right or moral, or that IP protections are wrong, but that it's a valid debate to what extent these things should apply, and what morality is attached. Our laws as they are today are not necessarily an embodiment of what is true morality. Just dismissing it as "stealing is wrong!" is not a strong argument. Most of us agree with taxation, but in a way that's stealing as well.

res0nat0r 7y ago

This is already being shown via an article from yesterday: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190320/07442041832/ironically-too-many-video-streaming-choices-may-drive-users-back-to-piracy.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190320/07442041832/ironi... Everything available everywhere for $12.99/month isn't feasible so folks are going back to piracy, even though signing up for a handful of streaming services one time is easy. Folks just don't want to spend the money per month it would take to watch everything they like. This was always the inevitable outcome of trying to do a la carte TV and approach the original cost of a monthly Comcast bill.

overcast 7y ago
"Folks just don't want to spend the money per month it would take to watch everything they like." Exactly my point. I get why they are doing it, but not for the idealistic reasons OP referred to. People will always choose free over paying for something. It has nothing to do with whether they can afford it, or it has DRM, or they want to "try" it before they buy it. Before the internet/torrents, everyone had no problem dumping tons of money into cable. When VHS came on the scene, everyone began copying movies and distributing them.
- lawl 7y ago
  I don't think it's for idealistic reasons either, but I fully believe piracy is a service problem and not so much free vs paid. I honestly can't remember the last time I pirated a PC game. Steam is just more convenient than pirating a game. And okay, when I was a kid i pirated games because I simply couldn't afford to buy them. I had a spotify subscription for quite a while, but they seem incapable of making a working music player. So now I'm buying albums on bandcamp and 'find' the missing ones online. Netflix here is so garbage, it just flat out made me stop watching movies and TV shows, I just watch youtube/twitch instead these days. As soon as your service is better than piracy, people will pay for it.
  - overcast 7y ago
    So the question is this, if there was two versions of a popular torrent site, equal in every way, except you had to pay for one to get the same content. What percentage of users would choose to use the pay site? I suspect a small fraction.

TallGuyShort 7y ago

I pay for Spotify, but then the week after I bought a new Smart TV Spotify turned off access from the official Spotify app on the new TV, and told me they were revamping it. Years later, I still can't listen to the service I pay for on the device I paid for, and as far as I can tell I've only been lied to about it. But MP3s on a flash drive work great. I used to pay for FloGrappling. First weekend I had it, I wanted to watch 3 fights and they lost sound or partial video for all of them and had spotty service the day of the event. I had the results spoiled for me before I could watch any of them. They refused to refund me any money. YouTube had videos of the same fights, recorded contrary to venue policy, so I just started scouring YouTube a few hours after fights. NBC pays tons of money to get exclusive access to sporting events and then offers inferior coverage. But I can get on a VPN and get it elsewhere, or I can torrent it after the fact. Media companies steal from me all the time through breach of contract and anti-competitive behaviors. I'll pay for the service, and then the minute they break their end of the contract and don't care about it, it's on. I'm not going to spend money suing them or calling for charge-backs every time - someone has been offering me better service for less money this whole time.

yummypaint 7y ago
Indeed. Just as their systematic fraud is within the scope of the free market, so is piracy.
- TallGuyShort 7y ago
  I don't think systematic fraud is within the scope of the free market. One of the few things I think government should provide is a low-overhead way (lower-overheard than what you can do in court today, but maybe that would be abused) to hold people accountable for their word, and I would include things like this in that. But not giving chronic liars my money is close, maybe that's what you meant. But I think the prevalence of piracy is a "smell" about the business model. If people could materialize food in front of them for free without taking that food from someone else that would be amazing. That's literally a Star-Trek-level fantasy about ideal society. As long as the food companies stay in business. In this case, the "companies" are having no problem staying in business. Most money paid for music goes to record companies. The most successful artists make the overwhelming majority of their money from live performance and physical merchandise. So what value are the record companies providing. Distribution? No, independent artists can do that online through SoundCloud or even Spotify. Spotting talent? I think their taste sucks more often than not. I don't get it. I think really the value they provide is with connections to help an artist make it big - so in the big picture I'd say the record companies' customer is actually the artist.

sunstone 7y ago

As a linux user I'm not aware of any software that I want that I would have to pay for. I guess I'm in the 1%.

vorpalhex 7y ago

I've consistently bought something legally, and either lost access (service shut down, copyright issues removed the item from the service, etc) or was unable to actually access it after paying, and got no refund. Nowadays I buy all the media I can (the restriction always being availability, usually region locking but occasionally something being too old), and then I immediately pirate a copy and usually consume the pirated copy since there's no DRM nonsense and I can actually get to my damned content.

overcast 7y ago
Your situation is the 1%, and that's awesome. You support the creators, AND you get a copy for yourself that is the most convenient. There is just NO WAY everyone else is doing that though. People have not purchased the thousands of movies they have on their 4TB hard drives.
- anoncake 7y ago
  I don't think this is a great situation/course of action. - Depending on your jurisdiction, you may break the law anyway and risk trouble. - By buying something that you don't actually use, you effectively donate to a for-profit entity. To me at least, that feels very wrong. Donating directly to the creator would be different but since DRM is involved, you probably pay a middleman. - Even worse: by paying for DRM-infested media, you encourage the use of DRM.
theK 7y ago
Ditto, if you compute long enough you are virtually guaranteed to live the frustration of artificial boundaries brought to you by DRM. We really need to get over this topic as a species and head forward towards free, unassailable information access...

matz1 7y ago

Agree. I would 100% steal if by doing so giving me something I want but doesn't cause me any trouble or inconvenient. Software piracy fit very well here.

A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago

That is a rather broad brush you seem to be painting with. But I can only speak for myself. I have disposable income. I haven't pirated in a good while ( gog and steam making it mostly pointless -- though I did uninstall steam recently for other reasons ). One of the game I was considering ( borderlands 3 ) is coming out on epic store with restrictive drm Denuvo. Now I can afford it, but ever since certain company that shall remain nameless decided to rootkit my PC, I became less than forgiving about drm. Hell, torrent may be the only way to have drm free experience on some games. I am not asking for free. I am not making gaming a right, but I expect that as a customer I am treated seriously. I am not. Torrents even out the playing field, cuz clearly no one cares what me as a customer thinks. Torrents put the fear of god back in the executive types.