8 ms·

I really don't like the "don't make me steal" attitude. It undermines a good society. The creators of this campaign decided that "Purchase should not exceed th

I really don't like the "don't make me steal" attitude. It undermines a good society. The creators of this campaign decided that "Purchase should not exceed the cinema price." Really? What if we did that for, say, organic bread. "I won't buy organic bread unless it's x3 or less than the cost of the generic white bread. If it is more expensive, I'm entitled to steal it." Sorry folks, you're entitled to not buy it, not to steal it.

krainboltgreene 16y ago
In the context of downloading movies not buying is the same as "stealing".
- StavrosK 16y ago
  Replace "stealing" with "watch it without paying".
  - endtime 16y ago
    You're entitled to watch organic bread without paying. The problem with comparing content piracy with theft of physical objects is that the latter are scare and the former is not. I'm not trying to justify content piracy, I'm just saying that you-wouldn't-download-a-car analogies are invalid.
    - tptacek 16y ago
      No, you aren't. The response to your silly analogy is, "if I throw a black drape over my organic bread and allow you to see it only after paying for a loaf, you cannot legally enter my shop and remove the drape". The fact that nobody would set up such a system is evidence that your analogy is unproductive, not that your argument is strong.
      - endtime 16y ago
        The very point of my comment is that such analogies are silly and unproductive.
        tptacek 16y ago
        I said your analogy was unproductive. I don't agree that all of them are.
  - barrkel 16y ago
    Assume there is zero distribution and duplication costs for the goods we're talking about. I'm going to assert that the optimal pricing strategy for these goods is one of per-customer price discrimination, where the price is the highest one the customer can afford and at which the customer still values the content more than the opportunity cost foregone by exchanging money for it. I would expect this to give an exponential distribution of prices: a few with a very high price, more with somewhat lower, and so on until a very long tail with a very low price (e.g. in the $0.0001 range). This should give maximum profit to the seller of the content, and simultaneously maximize value for consumers of the content, because all consumers who want to view the product and can afford it get to watch it. Of course, it assumes a market where arbitrage is impossible, and consumers don't revolt at getting different prices (which they will perceive to be "unfair"). So instead, we have a market with an arbitrary cut-off point for the lowest price segment. That leaves large numbers of marginal people who could get value from the content, but not so much value that they can afford to pay this particular cut-off point, or they can get other things which they perceive to give better value. At the other end of the spectrum, at the highest price discrimination segments (fan packs, "ultimate" bundles etc.), the people with the most money are probably not being charged enough. In effect, people who can afford to pay a high price are getting off light, while people who can't afford the lowest price are being excluded completely. Meanwhile, the seller of the content is not making as much money as they could. Some would say that this is an unfair situation for everybody, except for the richest people. There are alternative models of paying for content. For example, there could be a combination of a content usage monitoring system, a progressive tax collection mechanism, and redistribution to producers in proportion to how much is consumed. But above all, I think it's important to get away from the idea that these goods are like physical goods, and getting them for very cheap or free is "stealing". It's intellectually dishonest.
- markstansbury 16y ago
  In the context of going out to dinner not buying is the same as "stealing". I think we can do this all day.
- eli 16y ago
  We agree that authors of digital content deserve to get paid, right? Then it doesn't really matter what you call people who manage to avoid paying. This debate over semantics does not help advance the discussion.
  - tyhjnmyh 16y ago
    Sure - I would love the creators of the content to get paid. Unfortunately the writer of Forrest Gump didn't get paid because the movie made a loss, Stan Lee didn't get paid for Spiderman because the company that made it sold it their distribution arm for $1. Peter Jackson and various actors didn't get paid properly for LotR because the studio can keep the accounts secret.
    - SoftwareMaven 16y ago
      And you stealing the movie helps them how? Two completely independent wrongs do not make a right.
      - tyhjnmyh 16y ago
        Neither does movie studios calling me thief for watching a movie I bought on DVD on my tablet - while at the same time claiming $Bn grossing movies made a loss when it comes to paying the author.
  - krainboltgreene 16y ago
    This isn't about getting paid. This is purely a comparison. If I'm stealing a movie that by definition means I'm not buying that movie. Thanks for the downvotes though.
citricsquid 16y ago
"Sorry folks, you're entitled to not buy it, not to steal it." EXACTLY. Yes, downloading a movie isn't exactly stealing, but it's still taking something without permission and it should be frowned upon just as much as stealing is. If a person pirates a movie they're taking something without reimbursing the rights owner with what they want. People aren't judged for stealing because it costs the store owner money, they're judged because it's immoral! When someone steals a DVD from walmart nobody says "Whoa, you stole $9.99 worth of product! You should be ashamed!" they say "You stole something you weren't allowed, you should be ashamed". Why online does it suddenly become about the cost? it doesn't matter how ridiculous their demands are, if Disney want $100,000 per copy of their latest film, that's their choice, if you disagree then don't buy it that doesn't mean you should just take it. The whole idea behind this website is self entitlement, nobody is entitled to someone else's creation and the idea that this website is doing the content creators a favour is laughable. If someone creates content (or someone owns the rights to created content) it should be their choice how people consume and acquire it, whether that's free, $9.99 or $100,000, that's their choice and we should abide by it. Pay what they want or don't have it.
- kijinbear 16y ago
  > People aren't judged for stealing because it costs the store owner money, they're judged because it's immoral! I'm not sure it's as simple as that. One could always ask: "Why is it immoral to steal?" and the answer usually revolves around how stealing deprives the owner of something he had a legitimate claim to, etc. etc. That's how our moral intuitions have evolved over thousands of years. The fact that this age-old intuition no longer seems to apply online is exactly why piracy creates a moral conundrum. You can't resolve the conundrum by fiat. Copyright infringement is a different crime from stealing, and rightly so, because piracy has different moral and economic implications than stealing has.
  - citricsquid 16y ago
    I must be completely insane then, because I don't see stealing as wrong because it deprives the owner of their property, I see it as wrong because you're taking something you don't own on your own terms, not the terms of the person who owns it. If John the shop owner wants to sell bread for $10/loaf and you take it for free, that's immoral because it was his bread and he wanted $10 for it. If Tony the musician wants $10 for an mp3 copy of his latest single and you take it for free, that's immoral because it's his and he wants $10 for it. Whether or not you deprive the person of money is a side issue, the idea of ownership matters more, to me at least. If I own something through purchase, creation or inheritance it's still mine and you have no right to take it, whether or not it deprives me of it, it's still immoral. summary: my content, my terms.
cmars232 16y ago
Yeah, but I would download a loaf of organic bread if I could. And I'd copy that loaf whenever I needed more for a sandwich, and I'd upload that bread pattern to all my friends, and give away free slices to any hungry people I came across. Post-scarcity is funny that way.
- gaius 16y ago
  Because we're post-wheat-scarcity? No seriously - we are not post-movie-scarcity because making a blockbuster costs a vast amount of money - and much of that is people's salaries, people not unlike you - and it's a risky business (e.g. Kevin Costner might be involved) and if that cost is not recouped... Well the industry is going to go only for safe bets (sequels/remakes). It's like another thread on here at the moment, about it taking 5 minutes to upload a favicon. Sure, but that's not how much time it takes to get from scratch to actual deliverable.
- eli 16y ago
  Sure, and if you ever create a film, feel free to release it under Creative Commons so that people can treat it that way. But not every content creator feels that way and you don't have the right to overrule them just because you can.
samstokes 16y ago
The way the "manifesto" is worded does unfortunately reek of entitlement, but they do make a valid point. If you see their bullet points as rows in a product comparison table between legal movie distribution channels, most of them score badly on most of those points, whereas piracy ticks nearly all of them. (It would of course be a fairer comparison if there was a row for "is legal".) They're making the point that legal movie distribution channels are worse products - by those criteria - than piracy. Put another way, there are other reasons for choosing to pirate a movie besides not wanting to pay for it. It's unrealistic to demand all of the things this manifesto does, but actually the sum of their demands doesn't seem like a bad ideal to aim for.
- tptacek 16y ago
  Yes! Copying things without paying for them is in fact more consumer-friendly than any conceivable paid option.
  - samstokes 16y ago
    You obviously have an axe to grind, but you missed the point: the situation is such that people would choose to pirate movies even if it cost just as much as acquiring them legally. Indeed I'm guessing that there are private BitTorrent trackers which offer just that, presumably offering better seeder ratios or quality controls on content to justify the price. I imagine if this "manifesto" were a blog post by a Silicon Valley celebrity, and it began "There's a huge opportunity being missed..." rather than "I will keep stealing your stuff until...", but had otherwise identical content, this thread would have a lot less discussion of the immorality of piracy and a lot more of how startups could disrupt existing distribution methods.
- bena 16y ago
  They've unfairly tipped the scales in favor of piracy though. That's why the entire thing reeks of entitlement and why no legal service satisfies their demands. It's deliberate. That and they provide no reasoning as to their points. They want the purchase price to not exceed the cinema price. But cinema price is dependent upon the area and theater, so it's not so easy to peg purchase to cinema. That and why should the purchase price be pegged to the cinema price? A visit to the cinema is a one time event. A purchase entitles you to unlimited viewing. That's worth more to me. Why should TV shows be 1/3 the price of movies? Most TV shows exceed the length of a film many times over. Yet we're supposed to pay less for more content? They also want to dictate how movies are distributed. They want access to every movie ever made. Nothing gives you that except piracy. The cost for Netflix to do such a thing would be astronomical. And for that, these benevolent individuals are willing to bestow upon the providers of these services 3 movie tickets, or (by their other claims) the price of 3 films. Why? You have instant access to every movie ever made. Watching over 3 movies in a month using this service diminishes the price you are paying per movie. Watching a movie a day makes your movie watching habits cost 1/10 of a film using the service. That and their filtering suggestions are stupid. Why should a third party service let you sort by IMDb ID? Why should they care what a movie's IMDb ID is? This isn't a plea to studios to get them to change their "evil ways", it's a way for over-entitled douches to feel good about ripping people off. If any of these were real concerns of pirates, movies out in theaters wouldn't be pirated.
rickmb 16y ago
A "good society" is a society where corporations can run a legal extortion racket by creating artificial scarcity of the cultural products of said society and take draconian measures to protect said racket based on outdated legislation that was originally intended to achieve exactly the opposite? No, that's not a "good society". That is a sick and corrupt society.
jacoblyles 16y ago
What if the owner offers you the bread? Isn't that what happens when someone offers to let me copy a file from their harddrive over the internet? If you look back over my comment history, you will see that I have argued the other side of this issue too. That is because it is a hard problem that doesn't fit well with the moral intuitions that we developed for other kinds of property. To make matters worse, US copyright laws are way more strict than most people's moral intuitions of what intellectual property should be like. Even if you think the author should have some right to the content they produced, few people think creative works should be locked up until 75 years after the author's death. I have downloaded books illegally from authors that died in the 70s and I feel no moral qualms about it.
buffalo476 16y ago
I agree, most people feel entitled to pirate, whatever the reason. But many times I have bought media, and it has been significantly more restrictive than a pirated copy. To illustrate, I bought a bluray movie a few years ago, and put the digital copy on my computer. And since I had just purchased a new video mp3 player, I thought it would be cool to play the movie on there. It even worked great, that is until I accidentally deleted the movie from that device. Too bad the DRM on the digital copy would not let me make another. This was a legally purchased copy that was more restrictive than any pirated version. Content creators are treating their customers like criminals first, sources of money second, and customers third. So yes, "don't make me steal" does have some arbitrary demands, but a lot of what they say just makes good business sense.

krainboltgreene 16y ago

In the context of downloading movies not buying is the same as "stealing".

StavrosK 16y ago
Replace "stealing" with "watch it without paying".
- endtime 16y ago
  You're entitled to watch organic bread without paying. The problem with comparing content piracy with theft of physical objects is that the latter are scare and the former is not. I'm not trying to justify content piracy, I'm just saying that you-wouldn't-download-a-car analogies are invalid.
  - tptacek 16y ago
    No, you aren't. The response to your silly analogy is, "if I throw a black drape over my organic bread and allow you to see it only after paying for a loaf, you cannot legally enter my shop and remove the drape". The fact that nobody would set up such a system is evidence that your analogy is unproductive, not that your argument is strong.
    - endtime 16y ago
      The very point of my comment is that such analogies are silly and unproductive.
      - tptacek 16y ago
        I said your analogy was unproductive. I don't agree that all of them are.
- barrkel 16y ago
  Assume there is zero distribution and duplication costs for the goods we're talking about. I'm going to assert that the optimal pricing strategy for these goods is one of per-customer price discrimination, where the price is the highest one the customer can afford and at which the customer still values the content more than the opportunity cost foregone by exchanging money for it. I would expect this to give an exponential distribution of prices: a few with a very high price, more with somewhat lower, and so on until a very long tail with a very low price (e.g. in the $0.0001 range). This should give maximum profit to the seller of the content, and simultaneously maximize value for consumers of the content, because all consumers who want to view the product and can afford it get to watch it. Of course, it assumes a market where arbitrage is impossible, and consumers don't revolt at getting different prices (which they will perceive to be "unfair"). So instead, we have a market with an arbitrary cut-off point for the lowest price segment. That leaves large numbers of marginal people who could get value from the content, but not so much value that they can afford to pay this particular cut-off point, or they can get other things which they perceive to give better value. At the other end of the spectrum, at the highest price discrimination segments (fan packs, "ultimate" bundles etc.), the people with the most money are probably not being charged enough. In effect, people who can afford to pay a high price are getting off light, while people who can't afford the lowest price are being excluded completely. Meanwhile, the seller of the content is not making as much money as they could. Some would say that this is an unfair situation for everybody, except for the richest people. There are alternative models of paying for content. For example, there could be a combination of a content usage monitoring system, a progressive tax collection mechanism, and redistribution to producers in proportion to how much is consumed. But above all, I think it's important to get away from the idea that these goods are like physical goods, and getting them for very cheap or free is "stealing". It's intellectually dishonest.
markstansbury 16y ago
In the context of going out to dinner not buying is the same as "stealing". I think we can do this all day.
eli 16y ago
We agree that authors of digital content deserve to get paid, right? Then it doesn't really matter what you call people who manage to avoid paying. This debate over semantics does not help advance the discussion.
- tyhjnmyh 16y ago
  Sure - I would love the creators of the content to get paid. Unfortunately the writer of Forrest Gump didn't get paid because the movie made a loss, Stan Lee didn't get paid for Spiderman because the company that made it sold it their distribution arm for $1. Peter Jackson and various actors didn't get paid properly for LotR because the studio can keep the accounts secret.
  - SoftwareMaven 16y ago
    And you stealing the movie helps them how? Two completely independent wrongs do not make a right.
    - tyhjnmyh 16y ago
      Neither does movie studios calling me thief for watching a movie I bought on DVD on my tablet - while at the same time claiming $Bn grossing movies made a loss when it comes to paying the author.
- krainboltgreene 16y ago
  This isn't about getting paid. This is purely a comparison. If I'm stealing a movie that by definition means I'm not buying that movie. Thanks for the downvotes though.

citricsquid 16y ago

"Sorry folks, you're entitled to not buy it, not to steal it." EXACTLY. Yes, downloading a movie isn't exactly stealing, but it's still taking something without permission and it should be frowned upon just as much as stealing is. If a person pirates a movie they're taking something without reimbursing the rights owner with what they want. People aren't judged for stealing because it costs the store owner money, they're judged because it's immoral! When someone steals a DVD from walmart nobody says "Whoa, you stole $9.99 worth of product! You should be ashamed!" they say "You stole something you weren't allowed, you should be ashamed". Why online does it suddenly become about the cost? it doesn't matter how ridiculous their demands are, if Disney want $100,000 per copy of their latest film, that's their choice, if you disagree then don't buy it that doesn't mean you should just take it. The whole idea behind this website is self entitlement, nobody is entitled to someone else's creation and the idea that this website is doing the content creators a favour is laughable. If someone creates content (or someone owns the rights to created content) it should be their choice how people consume and acquire it, whether that's free, $9.99 or $100,000, that's their choice and we should abide by it. Pay what they want or don't have it.

kijinbear 16y ago
> People aren't judged for stealing because it costs the store owner money, they're judged because it's immoral! I'm not sure it's as simple as that. One could always ask: "Why is it immoral to steal?" and the answer usually revolves around how stealing deprives the owner of something he had a legitimate claim to, etc. etc. That's how our moral intuitions have evolved over thousands of years. The fact that this age-old intuition no longer seems to apply online is exactly why piracy creates a moral conundrum. You can't resolve the conundrum by fiat. Copyright infringement is a different crime from stealing, and rightly so, because piracy has different moral and economic implications than stealing has.
- citricsquid 16y ago
  I must be completely insane then, because I don't see stealing as wrong because it deprives the owner of their property, I see it as wrong because you're taking something you don't own on your own terms, not the terms of the person who owns it. If John the shop owner wants to sell bread for $10/loaf and you take it for free, that's immoral because it was his bread and he wanted $10 for it. If Tony the musician wants $10 for an mp3 copy of his latest single and you take it for free, that's immoral because it's his and he wants $10 for it. Whether or not you deprive the person of money is a side issue, the idea of ownership matters more, to me at least. If I own something through purchase, creation or inheritance it's still mine and you have no right to take it, whether or not it deprives me of it, it's still immoral. summary: my content, my terms.

cmars232 16y ago

Yeah, but I would download a loaf of organic bread if I could. And I'd copy that loaf whenever I needed more for a sandwich, and I'd upload that bread pattern to all my friends, and give away free slices to any hungry people I came across. Post-scarcity is funny that way.

gaius 16y ago
Because we're post-wheat-scarcity? No seriously - we are not post-movie-scarcity because making a blockbuster costs a vast amount of money - and much of that is people's salaries, people not unlike you - and it's a risky business (e.g. Kevin Costner might be involved) and if that cost is not recouped... Well the industry is going to go only for safe bets (sequels/remakes). It's like another thread on here at the moment, about it taking 5 minutes to upload a favicon. Sure, but that's not how much time it takes to get from scratch to actual deliverable.
eli 16y ago
Sure, and if you ever create a film, feel free to release it under Creative Commons so that people can treat it that way. But not every content creator feels that way and you don't have the right to overrule them just because you can.

samstokes 16y ago

The way the "manifesto" is worded does unfortunately reek of entitlement, but they do make a valid point. If you see their bullet points as rows in a product comparison table between legal movie distribution channels, most of them score badly on most of those points, whereas piracy ticks nearly all of them. (It would of course be a fairer comparison if there was a row for "is legal".) They're making the point that legal movie distribution channels are worse products - by those criteria - than piracy. Put another way, there are other reasons for choosing to pirate a movie besides not wanting to pay for it. It's unrealistic to demand all of the things this manifesto does, but actually the sum of their demands doesn't seem like a bad ideal to aim for.

tptacek 16y ago
Yes! Copying things without paying for them is in fact more consumer-friendly than any conceivable paid option.
- samstokes 16y ago
  You obviously have an axe to grind, but you missed the point: the situation is such that people would choose to pirate movies even if it cost just as much as acquiring them legally. Indeed I'm guessing that there are private BitTorrent trackers which offer just that, presumably offering better seeder ratios or quality controls on content to justify the price. I imagine if this "manifesto" were a blog post by a Silicon Valley celebrity, and it began "There's a huge opportunity being missed..." rather than "I will keep stealing your stuff until...", but had otherwise identical content, this thread would have a lot less discussion of the immorality of piracy and a lot more of how startups could disrupt existing distribution methods.
bena 16y ago
They've unfairly tipped the scales in favor of piracy though. That's why the entire thing reeks of entitlement and why no legal service satisfies their demands. It's deliberate. That and they provide no reasoning as to their points. They want the purchase price to not exceed the cinema price. But cinema price is dependent upon the area and theater, so it's not so easy to peg purchase to cinema. That and why should the purchase price be pegged to the cinema price? A visit to the cinema is a one time event. A purchase entitles you to unlimited viewing. That's worth more to me. Why should TV shows be 1/3 the price of movies? Most TV shows exceed the length of a film many times over. Yet we're supposed to pay less for more content? They also want to dictate how movies are distributed. They want access to every movie ever made. Nothing gives you that except piracy. The cost for Netflix to do such a thing would be astronomical. And for that, these benevolent individuals are willing to bestow upon the providers of these services 3 movie tickets, or (by their other claims) the price of 3 films. Why? You have instant access to every movie ever made. Watching over 3 movies in a month using this service diminishes the price you are paying per movie. Watching a movie a day makes your movie watching habits cost 1/10 of a film using the service. That and their filtering suggestions are stupid. Why should a third party service let you sort by IMDb ID? Why should they care what a movie's IMDb ID is? This isn't a plea to studios to get them to change their "evil ways", it's a way for over-entitled douches to feel good about ripping people off. If any of these were real concerns of pirates, movies out in theaters wouldn't be pirated.

rickmb 16y ago

A "good society" is a society where corporations can run a legal extortion racket by creating artificial scarcity of the cultural products of said society and take draconian measures to protect said racket based on outdated legislation that was originally intended to achieve exactly the opposite? No, that's not a "good society". That is a sick and corrupt society.

jacoblyles 16y ago

What if the owner offers you the bread? Isn't that what happens when someone offers to let me copy a file from their harddrive over the internet? If you look back over my comment history, you will see that I have argued the other side of this issue too. That is because it is a hard problem that doesn't fit well with the moral intuitions that we developed for other kinds of property. To make matters worse, US copyright laws are way more strict than most people's moral intuitions of what intellectual property should be like. Even if you think the author should have some right to the content they produced, few people think creative works should be locked up until 75 years after the author's death. I have downloaded books illegally from authors that died in the 70s and I feel no moral qualms about it.

buffalo476 16y ago

I agree, most people feel entitled to pirate, whatever the reason. But many times I have bought media, and it has been significantly more restrictive than a pirated copy. To illustrate, I bought a bluray movie a few years ago, and put the digital copy on my computer. And since I had just purchased a new video mp3 player, I thought it would be cool to play the movie on there. It even worked great, that is until I accidentally deleted the movie from that device. Too bad the DRM on the digital copy would not let me make another. This was a legally purchased copy that was more restrictive than any pirated version. Content creators are treating their customers like criminals first, sources of money second, and customers third. So yes, "don't make me steal" does have some arbitrary demands, but a lot of what they say just makes good business sense.