4 ms·

Copy or not, you're willfully depriving the company of their revenue. I don't much like how the digital landscape has played out in terms of ownership, but pret

Copy or not, you're willfully depriving the company of their revenue. I don't much like how the digital landscape has played out in terms of ownership, but pretending that torrenting a copy of a movie means you didn't steal it ignores the obvious.

acuozzo 6y ago
> you're willfully depriving the company of their revenue POTENTIAL revenue. You're working from the assumption that all pirates would purchase desired content if it weren't made available for free (illegally). The alternative you're ignoring is that a pirate can, and often does, choose different content to consume when initially-sought content isn't available to download.
- cocktailpeanuts 6y ago
  These arguments you're making are irrelevant. Even you yourself are using the term "pirate", which implies stealing. You talk as if "POTENTIAL revenue" is equal to zero, but if you studied economics you would realize that there is such a thing called opportunity cost. It doesn't matter if it's just "potential" revenue, what you are essentially stealing is someone else's opportunity cost. This is a different story if this person created music and gave it away for free intentionally (because he/she doesn't care, or in an effort to get more audience to monetize in other ways), but if Alice is providing X in exchange for Y, and you take X without giving Alice Y, then it is stealing. Your logic is "I wouldn't have consumed X in the first place if it was not free", and you are right. But at the same time, that does not change the fact that what you did there at the end of the day, no matter how NOT-valuable you see the product, is stealing. For example, this is like drinking a lemonade from a kid's lemonade stand without paying the $1 price, and saying "You know what, you should be thankful that I even consumed what you created. I would have never drank this worthless beverage for $1, therefore what I just did is not stealing"

acuozzo 6y ago

> you're willfully depriving the company of their revenue POTENTIAL revenue. You're working from the assumption that all pirates would purchase desired content if it weren't made available for free (illegally). The alternative you're ignoring is that a pirate can, and often does, choose different content to consume when initially-sought content isn't available to download.

cocktailpeanuts 6y ago
These arguments you're making are irrelevant. Even you yourself are using the term "pirate", which implies stealing. You talk as if "POTENTIAL revenue" is equal to zero, but if you studied economics you would realize that there is such a thing called opportunity cost. It doesn't matter if it's just "potential" revenue, what you are essentially stealing is someone else's opportunity cost. This is a different story if this person created music and gave it away for free intentionally (because he/she doesn't care, or in an effort to get more audience to monetize in other ways), but if Alice is providing X in exchange for Y, and you take X without giving Alice Y, then it is stealing. Your logic is "I wouldn't have consumed X in the first place if it was not free", and you are right. But at the same time, that does not change the fact that what you did there at the end of the day, no matter how NOT-valuable you see the product, is stealing. For example, this is like drinking a lemonade from a kid's lemonade stand without paying the $1 price, and saying "You know what, you should be thankful that I even consumed what you created. I would have never drank this worthless beverage for $1, therefore what I just did is not stealing"