7 ms·

One of the biggest successes of the music and movie industry is getting everyone to call unlicensed distribution “piracy”. It equates a completely non-violent

One of the biggest successes of the music and movie industry is getting everyone to call unlicensed distribution “piracy”. It equates a completely non-violent act with a very violent act that was once a capital crime.

paulcole 6y ago
I too avoid calling it piracy. Instead I call it "taking something you know you're not supposed to take." Edit: Really love these downvotes. Shows that people who engage in this act would rather have it called piracy because it's easier to brush off than having to look in the mirror and admit they're obviously doing something wrong. Sure they can mangle definitions of common words and perform incredible mental gymnastics but the bottom line is that taking something you shouldn't is wrong.
- XMPPwocky 6y ago
  What is being taken?
  - paulcole 6y ago
    Would love to hear your best guess/rationalization for how nothing is being taken.
    - nyx_ 6y ago
      These aren't new arguments, really... but when I steal a cookie from the cookie jar, there's one less cookie in the cookie jar. When I steal a movie on a torrent site, the copyright owner didn't lose a copy of the movie. One can argue that it represents an economic loss insofar as the person who stole it isn't going to buy a copy now, but a response you often hear to that is relatively few who pirate content would have paid for the content if piracy were unavailable.
      - paulcole 6y ago
        > When I steal a movie on a torrent site Is this the right thing to do? Is this something you should be doing? Is this something you feel you have the right to do? Remember that I didn't mention anything about economic loss.
        nyx_ 6y ago
        You called it "taking something you know you're not supposed to take", and the thread has been responding to the "taking something" part alone. Whether or not I believe it's the right thing to do seems like it'd depend on how much respect I have for copyright law, and whether any harm it causes is sufficiently abhorrent to me according to my personal ethics. The economic argument is part of assessing the harm it causes.
        XMPPwocky 6y ago
        You're absolutely right- this is an ethical issue. Perhaps it's a moral imperative to not pay massive conglomerates for a "license" to view content, or perhaps it's just a good idea to not support the privatization of culture. Personally, I won't judge you if you decide to pay off Disney to stay out of legal trouble, but...you know you're doing something wrong, right? Same if you're supporting Spotify's exploitative business model, even if you try to justify it by pointing at the scraps actual artists get. Oh, you mean you're trying to say unauthorized copying is unethical? Oh, darn it, scratch that. Sorry!
        probably_wrong 6y ago
        > Is this the right thing to do? Is this something you should be doing? People have said it better than me, but in short: Disney and friends have legally stolen public domain from all of us and erected a barrier between us and our human right to access to our culture. I therefore consider it my moral right to take back what should be mine - I may not have the means to buy the laws that would make it legal, but I have the technical means to do it and therefore I do. So yes, I consider it the right thing to do. Civil disobedience, if you will.
        6y ago
    - kikokikokiko 6y ago
      I'm an app developer. I implemented all of the tricks I know to make it as difficult as it gets for the paid versions of my apps to be pirated. And I also try to detect if the user is using adblockers to make so that they can't use my free apps without seeing the ads. But I'm not at all against the user being able to bypass my security measures. Nobody is stealing from me by not GIVING ME MONEY THEY OTHERWISE WOULD NOT HAVE GIVEN ME. I'm not entitled to anything. If someone has the knowledge to bypass my security tricks, good on him. He have one less bill to pay. I grew up very poor, and I still live on a 3rd world country. I do not remember to have paid for any software in my life, so I won't be a hypocrite. To compare making a copy of an intangible thing to stealing something "real", like a cookie from someone elses jar is absurd. If 10 million people make 100 million copies of one of my apps, I'm not being robbed of anything. If one guy takes for himself an Iphone I bought yesterday, he is in fact robbing me of my resources. Not earning possible hypothetical future income does not equate to stealing realized gains of the past. Copyright law as it stands today is an incongruent reliq of a time when technology did not allow for things to have no associated costs of reproduction.
- calvano915 6y ago
  I like that. I saw a cookie jar and I took one. I didn't bake them myself, and it's not my fault they stole your recipe and gave the cookies away for free.
  - HenryBemis 6y ago
    Heh, your example completely skips the fact that someone went out and bought the ingredients, bought an oven, spent the time to prepare the dough, spent money on the electricity to bake the dough, spent the time to take it from the oven, bought a jar, put the artwork on the jar, rented a café, and finally placed the jar with the cookies on the display. So.... the smartass "just took a cookie" the hard worker just spent time and money for everything else ;)
    - calvano915 6y ago
      Somehow the industry booms (at least the ones controlling ownership and distribution), despite all these cookie monsters.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
- no_to_copyright 6y ago
  The downvotes are because of your simpleton comment that deliberately ignores any nuance. It just comes across like you're stoking an argument rather than making a useful point.
- fortran77 6y ago
  I don't understand how all the people here, who all want to be the next Bill Gates and make a ton of money selling software, services, or Juiceros, think it's "ok" to steal content. (The same content that they probably deny they watch because it's not hip enough.)
  - BLKNSLVR 6y ago
    Thinking about your comment is bringing up a number of interesting threads of thought. Bill Gates made a ton of money and wasn't necessarily following either law or moral guidelines to do so. The success enjoyed by Bill Gates was hard earned. Success is a destination at the end of a journey that is too hard for a lot of people. Bill Gates' software is some of the most pirated software ever. Bill Gates is one of the richest people ever. Can anyone become anywhere near that scale of rich without being morally or ethically bankrupt? What crime 'piracy' in comparison to the business practices of the highly successful / profitable / rich? I don't know the answer to those questions, and I don't pass judgement as it's subjective, but they're the places my mind went in relation to your comment.
  - pwinnski 6y ago
    Bill Gates is your example? One of the worst examples you could have chosen, because he both engaged in piracy and was one of the top "victims" of piracy all the while he was becoming the richest man in the country.
    - Rapzid 6y ago
      And didn't MS at the time prefer people to pirate Windows and Office over not using it because it contributed to the ubiquitousness of those products?
  - michaelmrose 6y ago
    Stealing has a specific meaning. It is nonsensical to describe failure to follow copyright law stealing. Nobody calls exceeding the speed limit stealing velocity nor jaywalking "stealing the street". Rich people convinced other rich people that it would be a good idea to let rich people decide which bits I'm allowed to transmit to you in order to maximize the revenue of people who for the most part are in the business of licensing creative work not actually doing it. With zero chances of influencing the law on this or most other issues I can either choose to be a slave to it or not. Only slaves and cowards obey their masters even when they aren't being watched. I jaywalk too when its safe to do so. "Find me in New York for this quarter!"
- ssklash 6y ago
  The media companies have done an end run around the very foundation of how computers work in an attempt to keep from changing their 20th century business model. All digital data is a copy. It's fundamental to how computers work. That is terribly inconvenient for a business model that prefers to sell physical objects, but as computer science doesn't allow for that, they instead chose to reframe the issue in moral terms ("You wouldn't download a car!") and use tremendous lobbying power to force that view into law. Reasonable people can argue about creators being paid for their work and how digital distribution plays into that, but don't try to take modern technology/physical reality and impose your more convenient business model on it and on everyone else. People going to prison for copying movies is disgusting and immoral.
praptak 6y ago
The perception of piracy has changed though, not without help of the content industry. I bet they would prefer us to call it "terrorism" nowadays.
- BLKNSLVR 6y ago
  There have already been nudges into that direction: https://torrentfreak.com/uk-government-video-urges-advertisers-to-boycott-pirate-sites-160329/ https://torrentfreak.com/uk-government-video-urges-advertise...
thaumasiotes 6y ago
It's not really a success. Nobody thinks of music piracy as more serious because of the word. If anything, they think of nautical piracy as less serious, because music piracy is the phenomenon they're familiar with.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
sp332 6y ago
One of the biggest successes of the music and movie industry *from the 1660's https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/462700/what-is-the-etymology-of-the-term-piracy-in-respect-to-intellectual-property https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/462700/what-is-t...
DanBC 6y ago
The word has a surprisingly long history. > piracy > 2. fig. The appropriation and reproduction of an invention or work of another for one's own profit, without authority; infringement of the rights conferred by a patent or copyright. > 1771: Luckombe Hist. Print. 76 “They..would suffer by this act of piracy, since it was likely to prove a very bad edition.” > 1808: Med. Jrnl. XIX. 520 “He is charged with `Literary Piracy', and an `unprincipled suppression of the source from whence he drew his information'.” > 1855: Brewster Newton I. iv. 71 “With the view of securing his invention of the telescope from foreign piracy.”
renewiltord 6y ago
The only pirates around today in common culture are the Somalis who took Captain Phillips and Jack Sparrow. Barely anyone thinks about the former, so a handsome lovable rogue with a penchant for loving rum and being silly is what you get. If anything, that makes piracy sound glamorous.
ufmace 6y ago
IMO, one of the struggles of the rapid advance of technology in the modern era is that many genuinely new moral situations are coming up. Everybody tries to figure out what should happen in these situations based on somewhat sloppy application of old laws that are arguably no longer relevant and analogies to things that seem related but don't really represent the new situation. So exactly what should happen with regard to consumption of digital content that's expensive to produce but basically free to distribute? I'm not really sure, nothing that's been done yet seems quite right. Old-school pay big $$$ to own a copy doesn't seem to work very well, when most of the money is going to fatcat corporations that don't add any value, and "own" in the context of digital services that get turned off or moved on a whim doesn't seem very good. Piracy channels work great for the end-user, but nobody knows how to get money to the artist and producer when distributing through these channels. Subscription services seem kind of okay. At least until they either split into hundreds of them and you end up paying even more, or it consolidates into a couple of big ones who exert the same forces, especially regarding effective censorship for lack of willingness to take a chance on something risky, as the old guard did.

paulcole 6y ago

I too avoid calling it piracy. Instead I call it "taking something you know you're not supposed to take." Edit: Really love these downvotes. Shows that people who engage in this act would rather have it called piracy because it's easier to brush off than having to look in the mirror and admit they're obviously doing something wrong. Sure they can mangle definitions of common words and perform incredible mental gymnastics but the bottom line is that taking something you shouldn't is wrong.

XMPPwocky 6y ago
What is being taken?
- paulcole 6y ago
  Would love to hear your best guess/rationalization for how nothing is being taken.
  - nyx_ 6y ago
    These aren't new arguments, really... but when I steal a cookie from the cookie jar, there's one less cookie in the cookie jar. When I steal a movie on a torrent site, the copyright owner didn't lose a copy of the movie. One can argue that it represents an economic loss insofar as the person who stole it isn't going to buy a copy now, but a response you often hear to that is relatively few who pirate content would have paid for the content if piracy were unavailable.
    - paulcole 6y ago
      > When I steal a movie on a torrent site Is this the right thing to do? Is this something you should be doing? Is this something you feel you have the right to do? Remember that I didn't mention anything about economic loss.
      - nyx_ 6y ago
        You called it "taking something you know you're not supposed to take", and the thread has been responding to the "taking something" part alone. Whether or not I believe it's the right thing to do seems like it'd depend on how much respect I have for copyright law, and whether any harm it causes is sufficiently abhorrent to me according to my personal ethics. The economic argument is part of assessing the harm it causes.
      - XMPPwocky 6y ago
        You're absolutely right- this is an ethical issue. Perhaps it's a moral imperative to not pay massive conglomerates for a "license" to view content, or perhaps it's just a good idea to not support the privatization of culture. Personally, I won't judge you if you decide to pay off Disney to stay out of legal trouble, but...you know you're doing something wrong, right? Same if you're supporting Spotify's exploitative business model, even if you try to justify it by pointing at the scraps actual artists get. Oh, you mean you're trying to say unauthorized copying is unethical? Oh, darn it, scratch that. Sorry!
      - probably_wrong 6y ago
        > Is this the right thing to do? Is this something you should be doing? People have said it better than me, but in short: Disney and friends have legally stolen public domain from all of us and erected a barrier between us and our human right to access to our culture. I therefore consider it my moral right to take back what should be mine - I may not have the means to buy the laws that would make it legal, but I have the technical means to do it and therefore I do. So yes, I consider it the right thing to do. Civil disobedience, if you will.
        6y ago
  - kikokikokiko 6y ago
    I'm an app developer. I implemented all of the tricks I know to make it as difficult as it gets for the paid versions of my apps to be pirated. And I also try to detect if the user is using adblockers to make so that they can't use my free apps without seeing the ads. But I'm not at all against the user being able to bypass my security measures. Nobody is stealing from me by not GIVING ME MONEY THEY OTHERWISE WOULD NOT HAVE GIVEN ME. I'm not entitled to anything. If someone has the knowledge to bypass my security tricks, good on him. He have one less bill to pay. I grew up very poor, and I still live on a 3rd world country. I do not remember to have paid for any software in my life, so I won't be a hypocrite. To compare making a copy of an intangible thing to stealing something "real", like a cookie from someone elses jar is absurd. If 10 million people make 100 million copies of one of my apps, I'm not being robbed of anything. If one guy takes for himself an Iphone I bought yesterday, he is in fact robbing me of my resources. Not earning possible hypothetical future income does not equate to stealing realized gains of the past. Copyright law as it stands today is an incongruent reliq of a time when technology did not allow for things to have no associated costs of reproduction.
calvano915 6y ago
I like that. I saw a cookie jar and I took one. I didn't bake them myself, and it's not my fault they stole your recipe and gave the cookies away for free.
- HenryBemis 6y ago
  Heh, your example completely skips the fact that someone went out and bought the ingredients, bought an oven, spent the time to prepare the dough, spent money on the electricity to bake the dough, spent the time to take it from the oven, bought a jar, put the artwork on the jar, rented a café, and finally placed the jar with the cookies on the display. So.... the smartass "just took a cookie" the hard worker just spent time and money for everything else ;)
  - calvano915 6y ago
    Somehow the industry booms (at least the ones controlling ownership and distribution), despite all these cookie monsters.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
no_to_copyright 6y ago
The downvotes are because of your simpleton comment that deliberately ignores any nuance. It just comes across like you're stoking an argument rather than making a useful point.
fortran77 6y ago
I don't understand how all the people here, who all want to be the next Bill Gates and make a ton of money selling software, services, or Juiceros, think it's "ok" to steal content. (The same content that they probably deny they watch because it's not hip enough.)
- BLKNSLVR 6y ago
  Thinking about your comment is bringing up a number of interesting threads of thought. Bill Gates made a ton of money and wasn't necessarily following either law or moral guidelines to do so. The success enjoyed by Bill Gates was hard earned. Success is a destination at the end of a journey that is too hard for a lot of people. Bill Gates' software is some of the most pirated software ever. Bill Gates is one of the richest people ever. Can anyone become anywhere near that scale of rich without being morally or ethically bankrupt? What crime 'piracy' in comparison to the business practices of the highly successful / profitable / rich? I don't know the answer to those questions, and I don't pass judgement as it's subjective, but they're the places my mind went in relation to your comment.
- pwinnski 6y ago
  Bill Gates is your example? One of the worst examples you could have chosen, because he both engaged in piracy and was one of the top "victims" of piracy all the while he was becoming the richest man in the country.
  - Rapzid 6y ago
    And didn't MS at the time prefer people to pirate Windows and Office over not using it because it contributed to the ubiquitousness of those products?
- michaelmrose 6y ago
  Stealing has a specific meaning. It is nonsensical to describe failure to follow copyright law stealing. Nobody calls exceeding the speed limit stealing velocity nor jaywalking "stealing the street". Rich people convinced other rich people that it would be a good idea to let rich people decide which bits I'm allowed to transmit to you in order to maximize the revenue of people who for the most part are in the business of licensing creative work not actually doing it. With zero chances of influencing the law on this or most other issues I can either choose to be a slave to it or not. Only slaves and cowards obey their masters even when they aren't being watched. I jaywalk too when its safe to do so. "Find me in New York for this quarter!"
ssklash 6y ago
The media companies have done an end run around the very foundation of how computers work in an attempt to keep from changing their 20th century business model. All digital data is a copy. It's fundamental to how computers work. That is terribly inconvenient for a business model that prefers to sell physical objects, but as computer science doesn't allow for that, they instead chose to reframe the issue in moral terms ("You wouldn't download a car!") and use tremendous lobbying power to force that view into law. Reasonable people can argue about creators being paid for their work and how digital distribution plays into that, but don't try to take modern technology/physical reality and impose your more convenient business model on it and on everyone else. People going to prison for copying movies is disgusting and immoral.

praptak 6y ago

The perception of piracy has changed though, not without help of the content industry. I bet they would prefer us to call it "terrorism" nowadays.

BLKNSLVR 6y ago
There have already been nudges into that direction: https://torrentfreak.com/uk-government-video-urges-advertisers-to-boycott-pirate-sites-160329/ https://torrentfreak.com/uk-government-video-urges-advertise...

thaumasiotes 6y ago

It's not really a success. Nobody thinks of music piracy as more serious because of the word. If anything, they think of nautical piracy as less serious, because music piracy is the phenomenon they're familiar with.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

sp332 6y ago

One of the biggest successes of the music and movie industry *from the 1660's https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/462700/what-is-the-etymology-of-the-term-piracy-in-respect-to-intellectual-property https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/462700/what-is-t...

DanBC 6y ago

The word has a surprisingly long history. > piracy > 2. fig. The appropriation and reproduction of an invention or work of another for one's own profit, without authority; infringement of the rights conferred by a patent or copyright. > 1771: Luckombe Hist. Print. 76 “They..would suffer by this act of piracy, since it was likely to prove a very bad edition.” > 1808: Med. Jrnl. XIX. 520 “He is charged with `Literary Piracy', and an `unprincipled suppression of the source from whence he drew his information'.” > 1855: Brewster Newton I. iv. 71 “With the view of securing his invention of the telescope from foreign piracy.”

renewiltord 6y ago

The only pirates around today in common culture are the Somalis who took Captain Phillips and Jack Sparrow. Barely anyone thinks about the former, so a handsome lovable rogue with a penchant for loving rum and being silly is what you get. If anything, that makes piracy sound glamorous.

ufmace 6y ago

IMO, one of the struggles of the rapid advance of technology in the modern era is that many genuinely new moral situations are coming up. Everybody tries to figure out what should happen in these situations based on somewhat sloppy application of old laws that are arguably no longer relevant and analogies to things that seem related but don't really represent the new situation. So exactly what should happen with regard to consumption of digital content that's expensive to produce but basically free to distribute? I'm not really sure, nothing that's been done yet seems quite right. Old-school pay big $$$ to own a copy doesn't seem to work very well, when most of the money is going to fatcat corporations that don't add any value, and "own" in the context of digital services that get turned off or moved on a whim doesn't seem very good. Piracy channels work great for the end-user, but nobody knows how to get money to the artist and producer when distributing through these channels. Subscription services seem kind of okay. At least until they either split into hundreds of them and you end up paying even more, or it consolidates into a couple of big ones who exert the same forces, especially regarding effective censorship for lack of willingness to take a chance on something risky, as the old guard did.