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Is it really stealing if they wouldn’t have ever paid for it in the first place? If it’s not easy to find and use on a subscription service that I already have

Is it really stealing if they wouldn’t have ever paid for it in the first place? If it’s not easy to find and use on a subscription service that I already have, I’m just not gonna try to search for it or pay for it. What difference would it make if I pirated it and watched it anyways? (FWIW I personally don’t pirate anything, I just really don’t see the merit to the “stealing” argument)

Stunting 5y ago
Yes it is really stealing. You want something. You don't want to pay for it. You take it without paying. That's stealing. If you really truly didn't want to watch it, you wouldn't steal it.
- dml2135 5y ago
  You don't take it, you make a new, identical copy of it, leaving any previously existing copy intact.
  - Stunting 5y ago
    I'll go into your mailbox and take your paycheck. I'll provide you with a new identical copy of it. I'll leave the previous existing copy intact, but in my possession. Which one of us gets to deposit the money?
    - JamesBarney 5y ago
      You're copying the check but stealing the money. The money and the check are not the same thing. If I copy your car key and use it to steal your car. I've copied the key but stolen your car.
      - Stunting 5y ago
        You're copying the entertainment value provided and stealing the income that is related to that value.
        hunter2_ 5y ago
        What about borrowing from public libraries? Buying a used legitimate disc at a garage sale? Are people who do this in the wrong?
        Stunting 5y ago
        Finally! I agree with this. I think that physically purchased goods should be free from any sort of "DRM." and is not stealing. The difference is one party at a time, i.e. household, library patron, etc, can enjoy the entertainment service. When you pirate it, The original owner of the dvd retains the service value as well as providing the service to others without any value being transferred to the workforce/IP holders. That's the difference and I personally am all in for a mythical solution that but still allows complete freedom of ownership while also stopping people from digitally reproducing assets and dispensing them exponentially. I don't believe it will ever happen tho :/
        pie_flavor 5y ago
        Theft is when you take something from someone. As in, what you have materially gained, they have materially lost. Copyright infringement is not theft, and must be treated differently, because what you gain, nobody has lost; the supply is infinite. If you accuse someone of stealing the income, but they haven't gotten any money out of it, how does that make sense? What you're describing is a missed opportunity for a sale; had someone 'stolen' nothing and simply passed the product by, you would still not have made that sale and nothing would have changed.
  - TechBro8615 5y ago
    I generally support this argument, but to play devil's advocate, you might consider the bit stream used to transfer the content to be new bits. The file may be a bit-for-bit copy if you ask a computer, but streaming it required a series of voltage fluctuations that wouldn't have happened otherwise. You could consider that series of events to be roughly analogous to a CD-ROM containing some content. You can load the CD onto two computers and get two copies of its content, but there are two physically distinct CDs just like there are two physically distinct series of bits streaming to two locations.
  - Stunting 5y ago
    I will happily take your money and provide you with a new, identical copy of it if that's the deal you want to make.
    - Krasnol 5y ago
      That doesn't make any sense as an allegory. Nobody is TAKING anything. Everything is at the place where it belongs. Also if you'd be able to make identical copies of money, of course people would accept it.
  - mgh2 5y ago
    Literally the NFT argument
    - hunter2_ 5y ago
      An NFT is a certificate of authenticity. Copies of the associated item don't have a valid certificate. Getting satisfaction from a copy is orthogonal to the value associated with the authenticated original.
  - mockery 5y ago
    So if I make a new, identical copy of a GPL'ed codebase - should I feel free to use it for whatever purpose I want and ignore the GPL?
- hutzlibu 5y ago
  But you agree, that there is a difference between copying information and taking physical objects away?
  - roland35 5y ago
    I seriously don't understand why this point keeps getting repeated. It is just semantics! Yes, we all know copying a digital show isn't the same exact thing as stealing your car. However, you are still taking something of value! Let's say you snuck into my band's concert venue and didn't buy a ticket. Yeah you didn't physically take anything from me, but you are having access to something you shouldn't without paying.
    - pie_flavor 5y ago
      No, I am not taking anything of value. You still have all the things of value you had before. The difference between a rivalrous good and a non-rivalrous good is not semantics.
      - roland35 5y ago
        Call it stealing it or not, non rivalrous or whatever, the point is that the movie owners have intellectual property rights to their movies and can decide how it is distributed. If you think that's a dumb deal then you don't have to take it. Pirating it is simply wrong.
      - Stunting 5y ago
        piracy is receiving the service value of entertainment without providing the requested fee. Another word for it is stealing.
        pie_flavor 5y ago
        Theft is not defined by the receiving, it is defined by the taking. The moral ill is not you being enriched, it is the person who had it rightfully, being deprived of it.
- JamesBarney 5y ago
  It's not stealing, it's copyright infringement. If someone steals my car I no longer have my car. If someone copies my car my car loses values because there is now one extra copy of my car floating around.
  - bumby 5y ago
    If intellectual property is indeed property, it can be stolen. Considering (in the US, at least), intellectual property is codified within the Constitution, it's pretty hard to say it isn't real. Edit: to be clear, I agree it's not 'theft', but am pushing back on the way this distinction is sometimes used to insinuate that it is victimless (not saying the poster above is claiming that, just that it's worth pointing out)
    - xdennis 5y ago
      Often when you have to qualify something (intellectual property instead of just property), it's because it's used as a metaphor instead of a subcategory. Intellectual property is a form of property as much as political science is a form of science. You can metaphorically say it's theft, but it doesn't manifest as theft of actual property. For example: many people (myself included) have downloaded the $1.000.000 torrent (a list of files whose value amounts to a million dollars). I found nothing of use in it so I just deleted it. Did I cause a million dollars in damages? Was the damage restored when I deleted it? If you consider the same for actual property there's no question about it. Stealing a Bugatti does cause millions to be lost, and destroying it makes it irrecoverable.
  - Stunting 5y ago
    entertainment is a service industry. Extracting the service value without providing the requested fee is stealing.
    - dang 5y ago
      You've posted 67 (!) comments in this thread, mostly making the same point over and over in angry ways. I get that you have legit reasons for feeling strongly about this topic, but this is way over the top, so please don't do it on HN. We want curious conversation here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- burntoutfire 5y ago
  > You want something. You don't want to pay for it. You take it without paying. This is an age old argument... I'm not taking anything. I'm merely looking at something. The same way that I'm not "stealing from Leonardo" when I look at statue of David. I understand that the makers of the movie had some hopes of monetizing my looking but alas, they failed. Based on pure logic alone, it's clear that piracy is not theft, it's something else.
bin_bash 5y ago
> Is it really stealing if they wouldn’t have ever paid for it in the first place? Since when does it matter if I would've paid for it? If someone steals a Mercedes from a dealer is it not stealing if they wouldn't have bought it anyways?
- yata69420 5y ago
  That's stealing because it deprives someone else of their property. The dealer cannot sell the car once you've stolen it. "Intellectual property" doesn't really work like that.
  - Stunting 5y ago
    the income associated with IP very much does.
    - yata69420 5y ago
      Just out of curiosity, do they get deprived of the income when I download the content, or when I watch it? Do they lose more income if I watch the content with friends? In the early days of photography, people believed that if your photo was taken, it was stealing your soul [1]. I can understand the idea of piracy being wage theft in the same way I can understand the idea of photography being soul theft, but I think both are rather silly ideas. https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/8382 https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/8382
      - Stunting 5y ago
        We get deprived of the income when it is consumed without providing money for that service. If you watch it with your friends, 5 people watch it for one purchase. If it's good, you all tell 3 more people. Of those 15 people, 20 percent end up purchasing a viewing and the system repeats. When you pirate it you take all the service for zero cost. That affects real people.
        5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
CodeMage 5y ago
Yes, it is. But even though you didn't manage to communicate your point correctly, it still stands: the only reason streaming replaced piracy was because people could afford it and it was easier to use. Even the ease of use has declined, and the affordability is down the toilet. And as usual, we have people at the top reaping record profits and making victims of their greed blame each other at the same time. EDIT: Fixed a grammar error.
rhino369 5y ago
>Is it really stealing if they wouldn’t have ever paid for it in the first place? >If it’s not easy to find and use on a subscription service that I already have, I’m just not gonna try to search for it or pay for it. That is easy to say when you just take it for free regardless. I strongly suspect people saying that would actually pay for a decent amount of it if piracy wasn't an option. And the number of pirate I know would plop down 15 bucks for a movies (since CAMs and TSs are terrible copies) but won't pay for a movie on VOD (since they can pirate it in clear 4k) confirms my suspicions.
expensive_news 5y ago
Yes, obviously. I really don’t see how one could possibly sympathize with this argument. Say I go to a bakery and I only “sort of” want a cookie. I’m not hungry enough to pay for it, so I just take it, and claim “I’m not actually stealing because I wasn’t going to pay for it anyway“. You could claim it’s different with digital goods, but it’s not. Money still went into making that good (whether that’s software or a movie or even just a picture) and you’re still getting the benefits of owning that good without paying for it. Put another way, how does not caring enough about something entitle you to ownership? So you are absolutely stealing whether you would “have paid for it“ or not.
- californical 5y ago
  What if most of my enjoyment of a cookie is looking at all of the pretty designs and crafty details on the cookies, and I don’t actually care that much to eat them. Is it stealing to go into a bakery and look at the cookies, then leave? I’ve gotten all of my enjoyment for free, after all!
  - hunter2_ 5y ago
    You might be satisfied, but you only consumed a component of the work that the creator explicitly offers for free while refraining from consuming the component that requires payment. Just like browsing an art gallery: I'm satisfied seeing a painting in the gallery location, which is a freebie, and I don't care about also seeing it in the location of my choice, which has a price tag.
bumby 5y ago
This reminds me of the squatter issue and the claim that it's not wrong if the owner wasn't using it. This is only true if you have a vastly different idea of property (real and intellectual) rights that much of the country/economy is founded upon.
kjs3 5y ago
Such is the state of ethics is the world. Some people can justify anything.

Stunting 5y ago

Yes it is really stealing. You want something. You don't want to pay for it. You take it without paying. That's stealing. If you really truly didn't want to watch it, you wouldn't steal it.

dml2135 5y ago
You don't take it, you make a new, identical copy of it, leaving any previously existing copy intact.
- Stunting 5y ago
  I'll go into your mailbox and take your paycheck. I'll provide you with a new identical copy of it. I'll leave the previous existing copy intact, but in my possession. Which one of us gets to deposit the money?
  - JamesBarney 5y ago
    You're copying the check but stealing the money. The money and the check are not the same thing. If I copy your car key and use it to steal your car. I've copied the key but stolen your car.
    - Stunting 5y ago
      You're copying the entertainment value provided and stealing the income that is related to that value.
      - hunter2_ 5y ago
        What about borrowing from public libraries? Buying a used legitimate disc at a garage sale? Are people who do this in the wrong?
        Stunting 5y ago
        Finally! I agree with this. I think that physically purchased goods should be free from any sort of "DRM." and is not stealing. The difference is one party at a time, i.e. household, library patron, etc, can enjoy the entertainment service. When you pirate it, The original owner of the dvd retains the service value as well as providing the service to others without any value being transferred to the workforce/IP holders. That's the difference and I personally am all in for a mythical solution that but still allows complete freedom of ownership while also stopping people from digitally reproducing assets and dispensing them exponentially. I don't believe it will ever happen tho :/
      - pie_flavor 5y ago
        Theft is when you take something from someone. As in, what you have materially gained, they have materially lost. Copyright infringement is not theft, and must be treated differently, because what you gain, nobody has lost; the supply is infinite. If you accuse someone of stealing the income, but they haven't gotten any money out of it, how does that make sense? What you're describing is a missed opportunity for a sale; had someone 'stolen' nothing and simply passed the product by, you would still not have made that sale and nothing would have changed.
- TechBro8615 5y ago
  I generally support this argument, but to play devil's advocate, you might consider the bit stream used to transfer the content to be new bits. The file may be a bit-for-bit copy if you ask a computer, but streaming it required a series of voltage fluctuations that wouldn't have happened otherwise. You could consider that series of events to be roughly analogous to a CD-ROM containing some content. You can load the CD onto two computers and get two copies of its content, but there are two physically distinct CDs just like there are two physically distinct series of bits streaming to two locations.
- Stunting 5y ago
  I will happily take your money and provide you with a new, identical copy of it if that's the deal you want to make.
  - Krasnol 5y ago
    That doesn't make any sense as an allegory. Nobody is TAKING anything. Everything is at the place where it belongs. Also if you'd be able to make identical copies of money, of course people would accept it.
- mgh2 5y ago
  Literally the NFT argument
  - hunter2_ 5y ago
    An NFT is a certificate of authenticity. Copies of the associated item don't have a valid certificate. Getting satisfaction from a copy is orthogonal to the value associated with the authenticated original.
- mockery 5y ago
  So if I make a new, identical copy of a GPL'ed codebase - should I feel free to use it for whatever purpose I want and ignore the GPL?
hutzlibu 5y ago
But you agree, that there is a difference between copying information and taking physical objects away?
- roland35 5y ago
  I seriously don't understand why this point keeps getting repeated. It is just semantics! Yes, we all know copying a digital show isn't the same exact thing as stealing your car. However, you are still taking something of value! Let's say you snuck into my band's concert venue and didn't buy a ticket. Yeah you didn't physically take anything from me, but you are having access to something you shouldn't without paying.
  - pie_flavor 5y ago
    No, I am not taking anything of value. You still have all the things of value you had before. The difference between a rivalrous good and a non-rivalrous good is not semantics.
    - roland35 5y ago
      Call it stealing it or not, non rivalrous or whatever, the point is that the movie owners have intellectual property rights to their movies and can decide how it is distributed. If you think that's a dumb deal then you don't have to take it. Pirating it is simply wrong.
    - Stunting 5y ago
      piracy is receiving the service value of entertainment without providing the requested fee. Another word for it is stealing.
      - pie_flavor 5y ago
        Theft is not defined by the receiving, it is defined by the taking. The moral ill is not you being enriched, it is the person who had it rightfully, being deprived of it.
JamesBarney 5y ago
It's not stealing, it's copyright infringement. If someone steals my car I no longer have my car. If someone copies my car my car loses values because there is now one extra copy of my car floating around.
- bumby 5y ago
  If intellectual property is indeed property, it can be stolen. Considering (in the US, at least), intellectual property is codified within the Constitution, it's pretty hard to say it isn't real. Edit: to be clear, I agree it's not 'theft', but am pushing back on the way this distinction is sometimes used to insinuate that it is victimless (not saying the poster above is claiming that, just that it's worth pointing out)
  - xdennis 5y ago
    Often when you have to qualify something (intellectual property instead of just property), it's because it's used as a metaphor instead of a subcategory. Intellectual property is a form of property as much as political science is a form of science. You can metaphorically say it's theft, but it doesn't manifest as theft of actual property. For example: many people (myself included) have downloaded the $1.000.000 torrent (a list of files whose value amounts to a million dollars). I found nothing of use in it so I just deleted it. Did I cause a million dollars in damages? Was the damage restored when I deleted it? If you consider the same for actual property there's no question about it. Stealing a Bugatti does cause millions to be lost, and destroying it makes it irrecoverable.
- Stunting 5y ago
  entertainment is a service industry. Extracting the service value without providing the requested fee is stealing.
  - dang 5y ago
    You've posted 67 (!) comments in this thread, mostly making the same point over and over in angry ways. I get that you have legit reasons for feeling strongly about this topic, but this is way over the top, so please don't do it on HN. We want curious conversation here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
burntoutfire 5y ago
> You want something. You don't want to pay for it. You take it without paying. This is an age old argument... I'm not taking anything. I'm merely looking at something. The same way that I'm not "stealing from Leonardo" when I look at statue of David. I understand that the makers of the movie had some hopes of monetizing my looking but alas, they failed. Based on pure logic alone, it's clear that piracy is not theft, it's something else.

bin_bash 5y ago

> Is it really stealing if they wouldn’t have ever paid for it in the first place? Since when does it matter if I would've paid for it? If someone steals a Mercedes from a dealer is it not stealing if they wouldn't have bought it anyways?

yata69420 5y ago
That's stealing because it deprives someone else of their property. The dealer cannot sell the car once you've stolen it. "Intellectual property" doesn't really work like that.
- Stunting 5y ago
  the income associated with IP very much does.
  - yata69420 5y ago
    Just out of curiosity, do they get deprived of the income when I download the content, or when I watch it? Do they lose more income if I watch the content with friends? In the early days of photography, people believed that if your photo was taken, it was stealing your soul [1]. I can understand the idea of piracy being wage theft in the same way I can understand the idea of photography being soul theft, but I think both are rather silly ideas. https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/8382 https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/8382
    - Stunting 5y ago
      We get deprived of the income when it is consumed without providing money for that service. If you watch it with your friends, 5 people watch it for one purchase. If it's good, you all tell 3 more people. Of those 15 people, 20 percent end up purchasing a viewing and the system repeats. When you pirate it you take all the service for zero cost. That affects real people.
      - 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

CodeMage 5y ago

Yes, it is. But even though you didn't manage to communicate your point correctly, it still stands: the only reason streaming replaced piracy was because people could afford it and it was easier to use. Even the ease of use has declined, and the affordability is down the toilet. And as usual, we have people at the top reaping record profits and making victims of their greed blame each other at the same time. EDIT: Fixed a grammar error.

rhino369 5y ago

>Is it really stealing if they wouldn’t have ever paid for it in the first place? >If it’s not easy to find and use on a subscription service that I already have, I’m just not gonna try to search for it or pay for it. That is easy to say when you just take it for free regardless. I strongly suspect people saying that would actually pay for a decent amount of it if piracy wasn't an option. And the number of pirate I know would plop down 15 bucks for a movies (since CAMs and TSs are terrible copies) but won't pay for a movie on VOD (since they can pirate it in clear 4k) confirms my suspicions.

expensive_news 5y ago

Yes, obviously. I really don’t see how one could possibly sympathize with this argument. Say I go to a bakery and I only “sort of” want a cookie. I’m not hungry enough to pay for it, so I just take it, and claim “I’m not actually stealing because I wasn’t going to pay for it anyway“. You could claim it’s different with digital goods, but it’s not. Money still went into making that good (whether that’s software or a movie or even just a picture) and you’re still getting the benefits of owning that good without paying for it. Put another way, how does not caring enough about something entitle you to ownership? So you are absolutely stealing whether you would “have paid for it“ or not.

californical 5y ago
What if most of my enjoyment of a cookie is looking at all of the pretty designs and crafty details on the cookies, and I don’t actually care that much to eat them. Is it stealing to go into a bakery and look at the cookies, then leave? I’ve gotten all of my enjoyment for free, after all!
- hunter2_ 5y ago
  You might be satisfied, but you only consumed a component of the work that the creator explicitly offers for free while refraining from consuming the component that requires payment. Just like browsing an art gallery: I'm satisfied seeing a painting in the gallery location, which is a freebie, and I don't care about also seeing it in the location of my choice, which has a price tag.

bumby 5y ago

This reminds me of the squatter issue and the claim that it's not wrong if the owner wasn't using it. This is only true if you have a vastly different idea of property (real and intellectual) rights that much of the country/economy is founded upon.

kjs3 5y ago

Such is the state of ethics is the world. Some people can justify anything.