6 ms·

When billion dollar companies, which are praised and supported by governments, download pirated material and do not pay, why should ordinary people restrain the

When billion dollar companies, which are praised and supported by governments, download pirated material and do not pay, why should ordinary people restrain themselves and pay? I cannot see how one can make moral arguments against piracy now. It makes no sense to pay if others are not paying and not punished for it. People also have a right to train their real neural network for free without paying.

RajT88 1y ago
The film and music industries really shot themselves in the foot when they got a tax on recordable media introduced in Canada. OK, CD-R's and flash memory cost a bunch more now. Streaming is legal, because customers already paid the record companies for their music they downloaded and put on that media. At least, someone explained this was the current state of Canadian law ~10 years back when I first visited.
- codedokode 1y ago
  Tax on recordable media is unfair because honest people who don't pirate anything also have to pay. As with the case above, honest people get screwed the most.
  - Gud 1y ago
    Nothing dishonest with pirating. You wouldn’t download a car? Well I would.
    - wubrr 1y ago
      I can't believe people still fall for the 'piracy bad' propaganda in 2025
  - subscribed 1y ago
    Wait a second, if I paid a tax allowing me to legally doenload/record..... what's dishonest in it? It's basically a subscription.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
- Levitz 1y ago
  This is basically the case right now in Spain. We pay a tax on every piece of recordable media (don't think it's only SD cards or hard drives, it applies to phones, laptops, mp3 players, ebooks, even smartwatches). In exchange, sharing media for personal use is legal, and P2P is sharing media. Doesn't stop corporations from trying to scare people off and complaining about piracy though of course.
  - crote 1y ago
    The Netherlands has the same tax, but they managed to ban the "sharing media" part. First they outlawed uploading media (you could make a copy for your own use, but as you didn't hold the rights you weren't allowed to offer it to anyone else), then they outlawed the downloading as well (you can still make a copy for your own use, but you can't obtain it from someone who doesn't have the rights to offer it to you). You aren't even allowed to download a copy of a piece of media you already legally own, so the only thing left is making a copy of a physical disk - which is of course made nearly impossible by copy protection. The organisation behind it is now even claiming that you should pay the tax when a streaming service uses storage space on your device to temporarily make an offline copy...
    - chairmansteve 1y ago
      I guess we're going to have to go back to telling stories around a campfire....
- xethos 1y ago
  Must have been a good while ago, as we're currently at $0.29 CAD for blank CDs and... nothing else. Nothing on uSD cards, nothing for floppies, hard drives and SSDs are levy-free,and blank Blu-Ray discs have no extra charge I'd actually rather this than the million dollar settlements for torrenting Germans and Americans have. We have "Notice and Notice", which basically means the ISP sends us a letter with very little legal heft to it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
imglorp 1y ago
Plus the idea that if you pay someone to "purchase" and "own" (their terms!!) content, then it's yours forever. Unless, of course, they renegotiate something upstream and subsequently remove the content from your "library" or your device. Or perhaps they lock you out of those things altogether. This means it wasn't ownership, it was subscription. So as they say, “if buying isn’t owning, pirating isn’t stealing.” https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2023-12-08-playstationed-tyler-james-hill-2ba28bfdbefc https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2023-12-08...
- bsimpson 1y ago
  Stealing is when you take something from him, and he no longer has the thing you took. Piracy is when you see something for free that everyone else paid money for. You watching doesn't prevent anyone else from watching. Piracy isn't stealing: piracy only deals in intangibles. Stealing is for finite goods. There's a whole "how do we pay to make stuff if people can watch for free" problem around piracy, but it's fundamentally a different thing than stealing.
  - throwawayxcmz 1y ago
    Do you consider fair evasion theft?
    - defrost 1y ago
      Not a great analogy given fixed space on a bus or a train; in rush hours a fare evader occupies a seat that would otherwise be occupied by a a fare payer (presumably). Media piracy is largely associated with either people that were never going to pay for a cinema seat or DVD, OR (and this is key) people that would likely pay for something were it available ...
    - beambot 1y ago
      I assume you mean "fare" evasion -- like riding a train or bus? Yes, it fits. There are a finite number of seats on the train, and your gratis use of a seat (ostensibly) denies another paying customer. Even if there's excess capacity at the time of your ridership, the train operator is designing their capacity with buffer, so you're essentially stealing the capacity. You could just as easily peg the theft to the incremental cost (electricity, gasoline, etc) it takes the train operator requires to move your incremental mass from A to B. This is distinctly different from infinite, free copying & distribution.
wubrr 1y ago
There were never any good moral arguments against digital 'piracy' to begin with.
- nh23423fefe 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - wubrr 1y ago
    Your inability to provide a single example, which would immediately disprove my point, is the evidence.
    - nh23423fefe 1y ago
      [flagged]
  - prepend 1y ago
    I think things are moral unless proven immoral.
    - energy123 1y ago
      Morality is self-interest. Piracy isn't immoral because they aren't staked in the impacted industries. Eating meat isn't immoral because it's in their self-interest to keep doing it. What is immoral are things that would impact them, like if I stole their property, or if I take credit for their code at work, or if I ate their dog. Morality is easy to understand when you realize everyone is a hypocrite who uses their large brains to construct post hoc justifications, not unlike LLM confabulations. You can't argue against it because you'll get yet another confabulation conveniently aligned with self-interest. We don't even realize we're doing it. It's so baked into our neurology.
      - cindyllm 1y ago
        [dead]
bsimpson 1y ago
I was in film school in the 00s, when the media companies were in the news for trying to bankrupt the families of high schoolers to make a point that piracy is bad. This was the "you wouldn't download a car" era, when they tried to redefine "stealing" to include piracy. The executives of these companies would come speak to our class in the evenings. I didn't even bother counting the number of times one of them would be making elated chitchat before/after class about how he had just been on some flight and watched some series on his iPod. On the one hand, everyone is just people. The people at the heads of film studios are also out of touch grandparents whose grandkids show them how to use modern tech over the holidays. But it was pretty disgusting to see the people in charge of the companies that were trying to ruin people's lives over widespread behavior, themselves participating in that behavior, and with no sense of irony or remorse. It never occurred to them that the thing they were doing in their personal lives is the same thing they were vilifying in their professional ones.
yalogin 1y ago
This is a good point. Stealing is a crime only for end users and not for companies. Why should end users feel any shame violating the DMCA when the government itself says it’s ok for companies to not honor it
- crote 1y ago
  You're not downloading a movie to watch, you are just "acquiring training material" and "reviewing" it to make sure you can use it to train a high-quality model.
  - codedokode 1y ago
    You just want to train a neural network in your head to be more knowledgeable about confronting evil empires, space flights and laser weapon, I think it is a "fair use". It's not like I planned to enjoy it.
  - wyre 1y ago
    This is/would be a fun point, but the illegality isn’t around watching the pirated media. When I torrent a copy of Terminator, the illegal act is acquiring the material, not my watching of it. I’m not a lawyer so I’m sure there is more to this definition.
    - volkl48 1y ago
      Not a lawyer but the de facto law has always appeared to only care about uploading. Torrenting gets you in trouble because uploading at least a little bit is inherent to how it (and some other P2P) is supposed to work, and that's enough for a case. Cases against people just downloading have always appeared to be very rare/non-existent, at least from when I used to follow the news on this stuff more. I don't think I've ever seen a case of someone threatened for solely downloading off direct download services, for example.
- stogot 1y ago
  Hold on. There are current lawsuits over this. The companies haven’t been exonerated yet
jayd16 1y ago
Real question... Is it actually legally tested to torrent any media, and claim its for training purposes?
matheusmoreira 1y ago
> I cannot see how one can make moral arguments against piracy now. I cannot see how these arguments could ever have been made. Intellectual property is logically reducible to monopolistic ownership of numbers. It's such a schizophrenic distortion of reality. It should be abolished. > It makes no sense to pay if others are not paying and not punished for it. It's not just "others", it's trillion dollar corporations! In the end I don't even blame them... There's no reason why technology should be held back because of intellectual property nonsense. I want them to train AIs on the entire body of works of the entire human race. And when they're finished doing that, I want their AIs to get leaked and pirated so I can run them locally on my computer.
throwawayxcmz 1y ago
What do you mean? is this about AI training on copyrighted material?
frollogaston 1y ago
Piracy did kill creativity in film just like people warned. Content is never going to be priced the way it used to be. The argument for respecting licenses when training AI is the same, if you make (or buy) something then you set the terms.
- BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
  Piracy isn’t all that important to prices. Most people won’t bother.

RajT88 1y ago

The film and music industries really shot themselves in the foot when they got a tax on recordable media introduced in Canada. OK, CD-R's and flash memory cost a bunch more now. Streaming is legal, because customers already paid the record companies for their music they downloaded and put on that media. At least, someone explained this was the current state of Canadian law ~10 years back when I first visited.

codedokode 1y ago
Tax on recordable media is unfair because honest people who don't pirate anything also have to pay. As with the case above, honest people get screwed the most.
- Gud 1y ago
  Nothing dishonest with pirating. You wouldn’t download a car? Well I would.
  - wubrr 1y ago
    I can't believe people still fall for the 'piracy bad' propaganda in 2025
- subscribed 1y ago
  Wait a second, if I paid a tax allowing me to legally doenload/record..... what's dishonest in it? It's basically a subscription.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
Levitz 1y ago
This is basically the case right now in Spain. We pay a tax on every piece of recordable media (don't think it's only SD cards or hard drives, it applies to phones, laptops, mp3 players, ebooks, even smartwatches). In exchange, sharing media for personal use is legal, and P2P is sharing media. Doesn't stop corporations from trying to scare people off and complaining about piracy though of course.
- crote 1y ago
  The Netherlands has the same tax, but they managed to ban the "sharing media" part. First they outlawed uploading media (you could make a copy for your own use, but as you didn't hold the rights you weren't allowed to offer it to anyone else), then they outlawed the downloading as well (you can still make a copy for your own use, but you can't obtain it from someone who doesn't have the rights to offer it to you). You aren't even allowed to download a copy of a piece of media you already legally own, so the only thing left is making a copy of a physical disk - which is of course made nearly impossible by copy protection. The organisation behind it is now even claiming that you should pay the tax when a streaming service uses storage space on your device to temporarily make an offline copy...
  - chairmansteve 1y ago
    I guess we're going to have to go back to telling stories around a campfire....
xethos 1y ago
Must have been a good while ago, as we're currently at $0.29 CAD for blank CDs and... nothing else. Nothing on uSD cards, nothing for floppies, hard drives and SSDs are levy-free,and blank Blu-Ray discs have no extra charge I'd actually rather this than the million dollar settlements for torrenting Germans and Americans have. We have "Notice and Notice", which basically means the ISP sends us a letter with very little legal heft to it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy

imglorp 1y ago

Plus the idea that if you pay someone to "purchase" and "own" (their terms!!) content, then it's yours forever. Unless, of course, they renegotiate something upstream and subsequently remove the content from your "library" or your device. Or perhaps they lock you out of those things altogether. This means it wasn't ownership, it was subscription. So as they say, “if buying isn’t owning, pirating isn’t stealing.” https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2023-12-08-playstationed-tyler-james-hill-2ba28bfdbefc https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2023-12-08...

bsimpson 1y ago
Stealing is when you take something from him, and he no longer has the thing you took. Piracy is when you see something for free that everyone else paid money for. You watching doesn't prevent anyone else from watching. Piracy isn't stealing: piracy only deals in intangibles. Stealing is for finite goods. There's a whole "how do we pay to make stuff if people can watch for free" problem around piracy, but it's fundamentally a different thing than stealing.
- throwawayxcmz 1y ago
  Do you consider fair evasion theft?
  - defrost 1y ago
    Not a great analogy given fixed space on a bus or a train; in rush hours a fare evader occupies a seat that would otherwise be occupied by a a fare payer (presumably). Media piracy is largely associated with either people that were never going to pay for a cinema seat or DVD, OR (and this is key) people that would likely pay for something were it available ...
  - beambot 1y ago
    I assume you mean "fare" evasion -- like riding a train or bus? Yes, it fits. There are a finite number of seats on the train, and your gratis use of a seat (ostensibly) denies another paying customer. Even if there's excess capacity at the time of your ridership, the train operator is designing their capacity with buffer, so you're essentially stealing the capacity. You could just as easily peg the theft to the incremental cost (electricity, gasoline, etc) it takes the train operator requires to move your incremental mass from A to B. This is distinctly different from infinite, free copying & distribution.

wubrr 1y ago

There were never any good moral arguments against digital 'piracy' to begin with.

nh23423fefe 1y ago
[flagged]
- wubrr 1y ago
  Your inability to provide a single example, which would immediately disprove my point, is the evidence.
  - nh23423fefe 1y ago
    [flagged]
- prepend 1y ago
  I think things are moral unless proven immoral.
  - energy123 1y ago
    Morality is self-interest. Piracy isn't immoral because they aren't staked in the impacted industries. Eating meat isn't immoral because it's in their self-interest to keep doing it. What is immoral are things that would impact them, like if I stole their property, or if I take credit for their code at work, or if I ate their dog. Morality is easy to understand when you realize everyone is a hypocrite who uses their large brains to construct post hoc justifications, not unlike LLM confabulations. You can't argue against it because you'll get yet another confabulation conveniently aligned with self-interest. We don't even realize we're doing it. It's so baked into our neurology.
    - cindyllm 1y ago
      [dead]

bsimpson 1y ago

I was in film school in the 00s, when the media companies were in the news for trying to bankrupt the families of high schoolers to make a point that piracy is bad. This was the "you wouldn't download a car" era, when they tried to redefine "stealing" to include piracy. The executives of these companies would come speak to our class in the evenings. I didn't even bother counting the number of times one of them would be making elated chitchat before/after class about how he had just been on some flight and watched some series on his iPod. On the one hand, everyone is just people. The people at the heads of film studios are also out of touch grandparents whose grandkids show them how to use modern tech over the holidays. But it was pretty disgusting to see the people in charge of the companies that were trying to ruin people's lives over widespread behavior, themselves participating in that behavior, and with no sense of irony or remorse. It never occurred to them that the thing they were doing in their personal lives is the same thing they were vilifying in their professional ones.

yalogin 1y ago

This is a good point. Stealing is a crime only for end users and not for companies. Why should end users feel any shame violating the DMCA when the government itself says it’s ok for companies to not honor it

crote 1y ago
You're not downloading a movie to watch, you are just "acquiring training material" and "reviewing" it to make sure you can use it to train a high-quality model.
- codedokode 1y ago
  You just want to train a neural network in your head to be more knowledgeable about confronting evil empires, space flights and laser weapon, I think it is a "fair use". It's not like I planned to enjoy it.
- wyre 1y ago
  This is/would be a fun point, but the illegality isn’t around watching the pirated media. When I torrent a copy of Terminator, the illegal act is acquiring the material, not my watching of it. I’m not a lawyer so I’m sure there is more to this definition.
  - volkl48 1y ago
    Not a lawyer but the de facto law has always appeared to only care about uploading. Torrenting gets you in trouble because uploading at least a little bit is inherent to how it (and some other P2P) is supposed to work, and that's enough for a case. Cases against people just downloading have always appeared to be very rare/non-existent, at least from when I used to follow the news on this stuff more. I don't think I've ever seen a case of someone threatened for solely downloading off direct download services, for example.
stogot 1y ago
Hold on. There are current lawsuits over this. The companies haven’t been exonerated yet

jayd16 1y ago

Real question... Is it actually legally tested to torrent any media, and claim its for training purposes?

matheusmoreira 1y ago

> I cannot see how one can make moral arguments against piracy now. I cannot see how these arguments could ever have been made. Intellectual property is logically reducible to monopolistic ownership of numbers. It's such a schizophrenic distortion of reality. It should be abolished. > It makes no sense to pay if others are not paying and not punished for it. It's not just "others", it's trillion dollar corporations! In the end I don't even blame them... There's no reason why technology should be held back because of intellectual property nonsense. I want them to train AIs on the entire body of works of the entire human race. And when they're finished doing that, I want their AIs to get leaked and pirated so I can run them locally on my computer.

throwawayxcmz 1y ago

What do you mean? is this about AI training on copyrighted material?

frollogaston 1y ago

Piracy did kill creativity in film just like people warned. Content is never going to be priced the way it used to be. The argument for respecting licenses when training AI is the same, if you make (or buy) something then you set the terms.

BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
Piracy isn’t all that important to prices. Most people won’t bother.