4 ms·

The difference is obvious. If they steal a Mercedes it's gone, the car dealer does not have it anymore.

by tigertigertiger 4y ago

Stunting 4y ago
when you pirate a show, no longer get the contractually based income related to your viewing.
- greatpatton 4y ago
  The probability of that income is quite hypothetical. Most of the time, the person would never have payed for it.
  - Stunting 4y ago
    and yet they consume it. Consuming goods and services without providing money for that is...wait for it.... stealing. Not paying for things that they do not consume is voting with their dollars.
    - elenaferrantes 4y ago
  - yreg 4y ago
    Do you believe that if there was no piracy people who pirate wouldn’t watch paid entertainment?
kemiller 4y ago
@Stunting your perspective in this thread is very valuable, and the best thing that streaming has done, much better than old-school bundling and certainly better than piracy, is encourage a boom in interesting content, and I'm very glad you and the other workers in entertainment are getting paid. But flogging the tired comparison between stealing physical objects and making illegal copies of content is a losing argument. Everyone instinctively knows it's not the same thing. Just because an end user gains a benefit they didn't pay for doesn't mean it's theft. The owner still has the content and can sell it to as many paying customers as they like. Once the car is gone, it's gone and unavailable to sell to someone else. Consider: what would the auto market look like if we had Star Trek-style replicators and could make copies of physical objects for pennies? Let's use bikes instead. If you had the ability to make cheap copies of a bike, would it be ethical to deny the use of a bike to a poor farmer who could use it to get goods to market and make their life better, when your marginal cost is near zero? Do the needs of the R&D people who designed the bike override that consideration? This is just as much of a problem for all the software creators on here as for the content creators, though the rise of SAAS has changed that somewhat. Content's inherent non-scarcity is one of the best things that has ever happened to humanity, it just happens to break our pre-existing economic model and hurt the people who create it. This is a fundamental shift in our economy that's underway and we have been lurching around trying to solve it for decades now. We need to solve it, but pretending that it's the same as theft is just not going to get us to a solution.
- Stunting 4y ago
  Or we could all just admit that it's theft. Society being in a lurch between how we handle our physical goods and our digital goods is a very important subject that is going to get ironed out over the next few generations I'm sure. That doesn't make it not theft, even if its' really easy to do.
  - hunter2_ 4y ago
    Virtually every dictionary clarifies that theft requires intent to deprive the original owner from using the stolen item, which is incompatible with the act of making a copy. As gp said, your points are valid, but you're using a word incorrectly. Just use a different word so as not to have dictionaries disagree with you. Copyright infringement.

The difference is obvious. If they steal a Mercedes it's gone, the car dealer does not have it anymore.

Stunting 4y ago

when you pirate a show, no longer get the contractually based income related to your viewing.

greatpatton 4y ago
The probability of that income is quite hypothetical. Most of the time, the person would never have payed for it.
- Stunting 4y ago
  and yet they consume it. Consuming goods and services without providing money for that is...wait for it.... stealing. Not paying for things that they do not consume is voting with their dollars.
  - elenaferrantes 4y ago
- yreg 4y ago
  Do you believe that if there was no piracy people who pirate wouldn’t watch paid entertainment?

kemiller 4y ago

@Stunting your perspective in this thread is very valuable, and the best thing that streaming has done, much better than old-school bundling and certainly better than piracy, is encourage a boom in interesting content, and I'm very glad you and the other workers in entertainment are getting paid. But flogging the tired comparison between stealing physical objects and making illegal copies of content is a losing argument. Everyone instinctively knows it's not the same thing. Just because an end user gains a benefit they didn't pay for doesn't mean it's theft. The owner still has the content and can sell it to as many paying customers as they like. Once the car is gone, it's gone and unavailable to sell to someone else. Consider: what would the auto market look like if we had Star Trek-style replicators and could make copies of physical objects for pennies? Let's use bikes instead. If you had the ability to make cheap copies of a bike, would it be ethical to deny the use of a bike to a poor farmer who could use it to get goods to market and make their life better, when your marginal cost is near zero? Do the needs of the R&D people who designed the bike override that consideration? This is just as much of a problem for all the software creators on here as for the content creators, though the rise of SAAS has changed that somewhat. Content's inherent non-scarcity is one of the best things that has ever happened to humanity, it just happens to break our pre-existing economic model and hurt the people who create it. This is a fundamental shift in our economy that's underway and we have been lurching around trying to solve it for decades now. We need to solve it, but pretending that it's the same as theft is just not going to get us to a solution.

Stunting 4y ago
Or we could all just admit that it's theft. Society being in a lurch between how we handle our physical goods and our digital goods is a very important subject that is going to get ironed out over the next few generations I'm sure. That doesn't make it not theft, even if its' really easy to do.
- hunter2_ 4y ago
  Virtually every dictionary clarifies that theft requires intent to deprive the original owner from using the stolen item, which is incompatible with the act of making a copy. As gp said, your points are valid, but you're using a word incorrectly. Just use a different word so as not to have dictionaries disagree with you. Copyright infringement.