4 ms·

"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 withou

"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.
  - tptacek 16y ago
    In fact, you can look at most real physical theft in the same terms and see how silly this "copying, not stealing" argument is. If I steal a $10 loaf of bread, how have I harmed the baker? Most people would say, "you took $10 worth of goods from the baker". But of course you didn't, says the pirate: you took $0.50 worth of flour and water and yeast from the baker, $0.20 in energy costs, and $2.00 in labor costs; you owe $2.70! The grim rhetorical reality of this argument is that most of the people on the pro-piracy side of the argument will go you a step further. "$2.00!", they'd say. "Why, everybody knows it should only cost you $1.00 to bake a loaf of bread."
    - yummyfajitas 16y ago
      $10.00 or $2.70, it's a moot point to the issue at hand. The baker has lost something. If I have the same pattern of bits on my hard drive that a movie studio has on theirs, the movie studio has lost $0.00. That's the fundamental difference between piracy and theft. If you want to assert that we, as a society, have made an agreement to limit people's freedom to configure their bits as they see fit in order to encourage content creation, that's fine. But make that argument, don't try to conflate configuring my hard drive in a specific way with depriving you of an object you own.
      - bena 16y ago
        Bullshit. Movie studios are in the business of providing a service. The studios have given their time and money in order to produce a motion picture. They are entitled to recompense from people in exchange for performances. Think of a film as a performance caught in time. The actors, directors, grips, etc. were all fronted money by the studios for their performances. In doing so, the studio has assumed all of the risk for putting on the performance. Therefore, when you copy a movie you are essentially sneaking into a concert without a ticket. You are stealing services.
        yummyfajitas 16y ago
        In a traditional theft of services, the service is only performed because of the promise of a thief. I.e., a taxi will not drive across town unless I promise to pay them - thus, the driver is deprived of that time/effort. In contrast, both movie pirates and people who choose not to view the movie made no promise to a movie studio. Sneaking into a concert without a ticket is trespassing.
jamesbritt 16y ago
"but it's still taking something " taking ? Or copying? Something? Or some representation? A problem with these discussions is that people use common words as if everyone had the same understanding of their meaning and application. If I download a movie, I'm not taking that movie. And what I end up with is not a thing; if I then move it over to another drive, no thing has moved, yet the movie can be watched. Now, in the end, this action it may or may not be wrong or immoral or whatever, but arguments based on physical notions of "take", "thing", "own" are putting the cart before the horse.
- citricsquid 16y ago
  taking = gaining possession of [item] taking doesn't have to be negative and it's not a word associated with either side of the discussion, it's just a word. I can take $10 from my mum to pay for dinner, or take a magazine from a shop (after paying for it), it's just the opposite of give. You can take with permission, that's why I stated take without.
  - kijinbear 16y ago
    When you take $10 from your mom, your mom no longer has that $10. When you pay money to buy a magazine, the shop no longer has that magazine and you no longer have the money. Taking in the usual sense is moving. But pirates insist that they can "take" without depriving the owner of anything. That's copying, which is a different kind of taking. It gets even more complicated if somebody first purchases a legitimate copy of a song or a movie, and then produces more copies to share with other people. You run the fallacy of equivocation when you use the word "taking" in both senses.
    - citricsquid 16y ago
      My usage of "take" is insignificant, it's just a word in my argument. You can "take help" you can "take ideas" and they're not physical. Please don't focus on the word "take", instead the actual argument :|
      - 16y ago
pmiller2 16y ago
Re: immorality of theft. I would counter that it isn't necessarily always morally wrong to steal. Suppose I need some medicine to survive and I have neither the money for it nor the ability to get the money legally. I would argue that since I will die if I don't get the medicine, it's then morally acceptable to either steal the money necessary to purchase it or to outright steal the medicine itself, provided doing so doesn't have the foreseeable consequence of putting the victim of my theft into a similar life-or-death situation. Would you agree that in this one situation, theft can be morally justified? If not, then say there were 10, 100, or 1000 people in need of the medicine; is it OK to steal to get it then? If not, is there a particular N such that it's OK to steal to save N people? It's just not that simple, and saying "stealing is immoral" doesn't cut it (IMO) as an argument against piracy, even if you buy the argument that piracy == stealing.
- patrickk 16y ago
  Related: poorer nations flout IP rights on some drugs, arguing that poorer people can't afford to pay the full price in order to get access to the drugs they need. "....in developing countries, especially Africa, counterfeit products were commonly available to treat life-threatening conditions such as malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/Aids, it said." http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/politics/Counterfeit_drugs_polarise_WHO_debate_.html?cid=8929518 http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/politics/Counterfeit_drugs_polar... (Not a great article, there are better ones available to go into the issue further. But it does illustrate the point somewhat.) The issue of the morality of "theft" becomes decidedly grey when lives are on the line, but using this argument doesn't help us tease out the pros and cons of the original argument - the morality of flouting copyright on movies. Using the example of medicine is an edge case where piracy/stealing/copyright infringement is concerned.
- Cadsby 16y ago
  Your comparing a life and death scenario to one regarding obtaining an entertainment product. It's a silly comparison and not terribly relevant to the topic under discussion. But even within the logic of your analogy, you're confusing a moral argument with an argument centered around practical necessity. You could argue that stealing a life saving medicine is necessary, as you would die without it. But that still doesn't make the act of stealing it a moral one, even considering most people would sympathize and likely agree with your actions.

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.
- tptacek 16y ago
  In fact, you can look at most real physical theft in the same terms and see how silly this "copying, not stealing" argument is. If I steal a $10 loaf of bread, how have I harmed the baker? Most people would say, "you took $10 worth of goods from the baker". But of course you didn't, says the pirate: you took $0.50 worth of flour and water and yeast from the baker, $0.20 in energy costs, and $2.00 in labor costs; you owe $2.70! The grim rhetorical reality of this argument is that most of the people on the pro-piracy side of the argument will go you a step further. "$2.00!", they'd say. "Why, everybody knows it should only cost you $1.00 to bake a loaf of bread."
  - yummyfajitas 16y ago
    $10.00 or $2.70, it's a moot point to the issue at hand. The baker has lost something. If I have the same pattern of bits on my hard drive that a movie studio has on theirs, the movie studio has lost $0.00. That's the fundamental difference between piracy and theft. If you want to assert that we, as a society, have made an agreement to limit people's freedom to configure their bits as they see fit in order to encourage content creation, that's fine. But make that argument, don't try to conflate configuring my hard drive in a specific way with depriving you of an object you own.
    - bena 16y ago
      Bullshit. Movie studios are in the business of providing a service. The studios have given their time and money in order to produce a motion picture. They are entitled to recompense from people in exchange for performances. Think of a film as a performance caught in time. The actors, directors, grips, etc. were all fronted money by the studios for their performances. In doing so, the studio has assumed all of the risk for putting on the performance. Therefore, when you copy a movie you are essentially sneaking into a concert without a ticket. You are stealing services.
      - yummyfajitas 16y ago
        In a traditional theft of services, the service is only performed because of the promise of a thief. I.e., a taxi will not drive across town unless I promise to pay them - thus, the driver is deprived of that time/effort. In contrast, both movie pirates and people who choose not to view the movie made no promise to a movie studio. Sneaking into a concert without a ticket is trespassing.

jamesbritt 16y ago

"but it's still taking something " taking ? Or copying? Something? Or some representation? A problem with these discussions is that people use common words as if everyone had the same understanding of their meaning and application. If I download a movie, I'm not taking that movie. And what I end up with is not a thing; if I then move it over to another drive, no thing has moved, yet the movie can be watched. Now, in the end, this action it may or may not be wrong or immoral or whatever, but arguments based on physical notions of "take", "thing", "own" are putting the cart before the horse.

citricsquid 16y ago
taking = gaining possession of [item] taking doesn't have to be negative and it's not a word associated with either side of the discussion, it's just a word. I can take $10 from my mum to pay for dinner, or take a magazine from a shop (after paying for it), it's just the opposite of give. You can take with permission, that's why I stated take without.
- kijinbear 16y ago
  When you take $10 from your mom, your mom no longer has that $10. When you pay money to buy a magazine, the shop no longer has that magazine and you no longer have the money. Taking in the usual sense is moving. But pirates insist that they can "take" without depriving the owner of anything. That's copying, which is a different kind of taking. It gets even more complicated if somebody first purchases a legitimate copy of a song or a movie, and then produces more copies to share with other people. You run the fallacy of equivocation when you use the word "taking" in both senses.
  - citricsquid 16y ago
    My usage of "take" is insignificant, it's just a word in my argument. You can "take help" you can "take ideas" and they're not physical. Please don't focus on the word "take", instead the actual argument :|
    - 16y ago

pmiller2 16y ago

Re: immorality of theft. I would counter that it isn't necessarily always morally wrong to steal. Suppose I need some medicine to survive and I have neither the money for it nor the ability to get the money legally. I would argue that since I will die if I don't get the medicine, it's then morally acceptable to either steal the money necessary to purchase it or to outright steal the medicine itself, provided doing so doesn't have the foreseeable consequence of putting the victim of my theft into a similar life-or-death situation. Would you agree that in this one situation, theft can be morally justified? If not, then say there were 10, 100, or 1000 people in need of the medicine; is it OK to steal to get it then? If not, is there a particular N such that it's OK to steal to save N people? It's just not that simple, and saying "stealing is immoral" doesn't cut it (IMO) as an argument against piracy, even if you buy the argument that piracy == stealing.

patrickk 16y ago
Related: poorer nations flout IP rights on some drugs, arguing that poorer people can't afford to pay the full price in order to get access to the drugs they need. "....in developing countries, especially Africa, counterfeit products were commonly available to treat life-threatening conditions such as malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/Aids, it said." http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/politics/Counterfeit_drugs_polarise_WHO_debate_.html?cid=8929518 http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/politics/Counterfeit_drugs_polar... (Not a great article, there are better ones available to go into the issue further. But it does illustrate the point somewhat.) The issue of the morality of "theft" becomes decidedly grey when lives are on the line, but using this argument doesn't help us tease out the pros and cons of the original argument - the morality of flouting copyright on movies. Using the example of medicine is an edge case where piracy/stealing/copyright infringement is concerned.
Cadsby 16y ago
Your comparing a life and death scenario to one regarding obtaining an entertainment product. It's a silly comparison and not terribly relevant to the topic under discussion. But even within the logic of your analogy, you're confusing a moral argument with an argument centered around practical necessity. You could argue that stealing a life saving medicine is necessary, as you would die without it. But that still doesn't make the act of stealing it a moral one, even considering most people would sympathize and likely agree with your actions.