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Why do people try to justify theft? That’s what I’m expecting to see in all the comments here. Like everyone is trying to somehow spin the whole situation into

Why do people try to justify theft? That’s what I’m expecting to see in all the comments here. Like everyone is trying to somehow spin the whole situation into some story that makes their act of theft morally correct. Don’t get me wrong. I pirate my self. But I’m honest about it. It’s theft. I steal because I’m a cheap ass thief. Why can’t you admit that about yourself? If someone makes their product annoying and hard to access that’s really their free will and desire. Enshittification is not a crime. When you choose to pirate that work you’re doing something morally unethical. Yet every pirate here tries to justify it. Just admit it.

matheusmoreira 1y ago
"Piracy" is not theft, it is copyright infringement. Calling it theft is not "honesty", it's just factually wrong. There's nothing to debate on this matter. > Like everyone is trying to somehow spin the whole situation into some story that makes their act of theft morally correct. Nobody is "spinning" anything. We're telling you what we believe and why we believe it. Actual moral justification involves the realization that all intellectual property is not only unnatural but also fundamentally unjust. First, copyright is a perversion of reality. The natural state of ideas is actually the public domain. Ideas are infinitely copyable and trivially transmissible. Copyright seeks to completely invert that reality. Copyright infringement is just reality reasserting itself. It happens every single day at massive scales without people even noticing or caring. It happens every time someone sends a funny picture to a friend. There is no such thing as stopping it, for it is natural, and natural processes shouldn't be stopped. Second, copyright is fundamentally unjust. It is a functionally infinite state granted monopoly on numbers. It's absurdity is merely tolerated because it promises well deserved rewards to creators, thereby incentivizing them. The original social contract was "we're all going to pretend we can't trivially copy your works for a couple decades so that you can turn a profit and then the works will return to the public domain where it belongs". So when was the last time a work you enjoyed entered the public domain? How many times has copyright duration been extended by now? It might as well be infinite. We're all going to be long dead before our culture returns to us. They've all made their fortunes a thousand times over but they want to continue their rent seeking and unlike us they've got the trillions of dollars needed to lobby governments and get what they want. Why fulfill our part of the contract when the copyright holders constantly demonstrate they're not willing to fulfill theirs? There's absolutely no reason to do that. Just stop pretending. It really is that simple. > When you choose to pirate that work you’re doing something morally unethical. Nonsense. Copyright infringement is civil disobedience of an unjust law and arguably a moral imperative.
- ninetyninenine 1y ago
  No. The entire games and movie industry exists because a segment of people don’t pirate. All the technology created to support those two industries mentioned above are supported by people who paid for their shit. Your view point twists reality because the financial realities don’t pan out. Who the fuck pays for a triple A video game if it’s morally right to pirate things? If you pirate you benefit off of millions of dollars used to create the game while you pay for nothing. Call it what you want. If it’s not theft then it’s not theft. But the gravity of the moral infraction is equivalent to theft so I don’t see the point of the word play here. The fact of the matter is your “morality” here cannot sustain the industry. Like as bad as law around copyrights have gotten, piracy in totality is fundamentally unsustainable. Ideas cost money to create and someone needs to pay. If not the consumer of the idea than the producer of the idea pays and functions as a charity to the consumer.
  - the_af 1y ago
    > Call it what you want. If it’s not theft then it’s not theft. But the gravity of the moral infraction is equivalent to theft so I don’t see the point of the word play here. No. As I said, we had this debate decades ago and your side lost. This is settled ground; you can shout into the void but you already lost. You might pirate because you're a "cheap ass" (your words, not mine), but many others don't. They've explained their reasons. You don't like those reasons? Fine. But don't go around accusing others of your own sin. Most people just want to watch and play stuff in the most convenient, non-intrusive, frictionless way possible. It just happens that this is often best achieved through piracy, because most legally available platforms suck in some way or the other (or content is not available). (Before you accuse me of anything: I don't pirate games like you, I have a huge library of Steam, GOG and Humble Bundle games. I also subscribe to Netflix, Disney, HBO Max, Apple, and a couple more I forget. And I pay for YouTube premium. And Spotify -- which removed vast swathes of music I listened to because why not. The streaming platforms mostly suck and so I must occasionally resort to piracy because it's goddamn more convenient!)
    - ninetyninenine 1y ago
the_af 1y ago
Piracy is not theft. We already had this debate decades ago, and your side of the debate lost. It's not "theft" by any reasonable interpretation of the word. It may not be legal, and it may be many other things, but it's not theft. As to why "people justify it", what's the point of even asking when the article and many comments here explain the reasons? You may disagree with the reasons, but they exist and they are coherent.
- keeda 1y ago
  > We already had this debate decades ago, and your side of the debate lost. It's not "theft" by any reasonable interpretation of the word. That's only true when you ignore many, many common usages of the word "theft". I would hazard a guess that your interpretations are along the dictionary lines of "depriving a person of their property." However, here are some commonly used forms of the word (supported by wikipedia and government sites) that don't fit that definition: - Wage theft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft - Time theft: https://www.adp.com/resources/articles-and-insights/articles/t/time-theft.aspx https://www.adp.com/resources/articles-and-insights/articles... - Identity theft: https://www.usa.gov/identity-theft https://www.usa.gov/identity-theft - Theft of services: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theft_of_services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theft_of_services - Theft of trade secrets: https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=TRADE+SECRETS https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=TRADE+SECRETS - Attention theft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_theft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_theft - Data theft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_theft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_theft - Electricity theft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_theft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_theft - Joke theft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke_theft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke_theft - Stolen valor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_valor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_valor And here are more colloquial usages of theft of abstract things: - Credit card theft (it's really just the number that is "stolen") - Password theft (usually "stolen" during a data breach, more numbers being stolen) - Bitcoin theft (even more numbers being "stolen".) Here's a very simple explanation for this: In common parlance, "theft" generally means taking something of economic value -- either physical, like property, or abstract, like labor -- from someone without giving any value in return against their wishes. If you extend this line of thought, you'll see why IP laws exist and why these abstract forms of theft are illegal. And when examined from that perspective, those coherent reasons are basically just different ways of saying "because I can get away with it."

matheusmoreira 1y ago

"Piracy" is not theft, it is copyright infringement. Calling it theft is not "honesty", it's just factually wrong. There's nothing to debate on this matter. > Like everyone is trying to somehow spin the whole situation into some story that makes their act of theft morally correct. Nobody is "spinning" anything. We're telling you what we believe and why we believe it. Actual moral justification involves the realization that all intellectual property is not only unnatural but also fundamentally unjust. First, copyright is a perversion of reality. The natural state of ideas is actually the public domain. Ideas are infinitely copyable and trivially transmissible. Copyright seeks to completely invert that reality. Copyright infringement is just reality reasserting itself. It happens every single day at massive scales without people even noticing or caring. It happens every time someone sends a funny picture to a friend. There is no such thing as stopping it, for it is natural, and natural processes shouldn't be stopped. Second, copyright is fundamentally unjust. It is a functionally infinite state granted monopoly on numbers. It's absurdity is merely tolerated because it promises well deserved rewards to creators, thereby incentivizing them. The original social contract was "we're all going to pretend we can't trivially copy your works for a couple decades so that you can turn a profit and then the works will return to the public domain where it belongs". So when was the last time a work you enjoyed entered the public domain? How many times has copyright duration been extended by now? It might as well be infinite. We're all going to be long dead before our culture returns to us. They've all made their fortunes a thousand times over but they want to continue their rent seeking and unlike us they've got the trillions of dollars needed to lobby governments and get what they want. Why fulfill our part of the contract when the copyright holders constantly demonstrate they're not willing to fulfill theirs? There's absolutely no reason to do that. Just stop pretending. It really is that simple. > When you choose to pirate that work you’re doing something morally unethical. Nonsense. Copyright infringement is civil disobedience of an unjust law and arguably a moral imperative.

ninetyninenine 1y ago
No. The entire games and movie industry exists because a segment of people don’t pirate. All the technology created to support those two industries mentioned above are supported by people who paid for their shit. Your view point twists reality because the financial realities don’t pan out. Who the fuck pays for a triple A video game if it’s morally right to pirate things? If you pirate you benefit off of millions of dollars used to create the game while you pay for nothing. Call it what you want. If it’s not theft then it’s not theft. But the gravity of the moral infraction is equivalent to theft so I don’t see the point of the word play here. The fact of the matter is your “morality” here cannot sustain the industry. Like as bad as law around copyrights have gotten, piracy in totality is fundamentally unsustainable. Ideas cost money to create and someone needs to pay. If not the consumer of the idea than the producer of the idea pays and functions as a charity to the consumer.
- the_af 1y ago
  > Call it what you want. If it’s not theft then it’s not theft. But the gravity of the moral infraction is equivalent to theft so I don’t see the point of the word play here. No. As I said, we had this debate decades ago and your side lost. This is settled ground; you can shout into the void but you already lost. You might pirate because you're a "cheap ass" (your words, not mine), but many others don't. They've explained their reasons. You don't like those reasons? Fine. But don't go around accusing others of your own sin. Most people just want to watch and play stuff in the most convenient, non-intrusive, frictionless way possible. It just happens that this is often best achieved through piracy, because most legally available platforms suck in some way or the other (or content is not available). (Before you accuse me of anything: I don't pirate games like you, I have a huge library of Steam, GOG and Humble Bundle games. I also subscribe to Netflix, Disney, HBO Max, Apple, and a couple more I forget. And I pay for YouTube premium. And Spotify -- which removed vast swathes of music I listened to because why not. The streaming platforms mostly suck and so I must occasionally resort to piracy because it's goddamn more convenient!)
  - ninetyninenine 1y ago

the_af 1y ago

Piracy is not theft. We already had this debate decades ago, and your side of the debate lost. It's not "theft" by any reasonable interpretation of the word. It may not be legal, and it may be many other things, but it's not theft. As to why "people justify it", what's the point of even asking when the article and many comments here explain the reasons? You may disagree with the reasons, but they exist and they are coherent.

keeda 1y ago
> We already had this debate decades ago, and your side of the debate lost. It's not "theft" by any reasonable interpretation of the word. That's only true when you ignore many, many common usages of the word "theft". I would hazard a guess that your interpretations are along the dictionary lines of "depriving a person of their property." However, here are some commonly used forms of the word (supported by wikipedia and government sites) that don't fit that definition: - Wage theft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft - Time theft: https://www.adp.com/resources/articles-and-insights/articles/t/time-theft.aspx https://www.adp.com/resources/articles-and-insights/articles... - Identity theft: https://www.usa.gov/identity-theft https://www.usa.gov/identity-theft - Theft of services: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theft_of_services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theft_of_services - Theft of trade secrets: https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=TRADE+SECRETS https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=TRADE+SECRETS - Attention theft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_theft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_theft - Data theft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_theft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_theft - Electricity theft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_theft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_theft - Joke theft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke_theft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke_theft - Stolen valor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_valor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_valor And here are more colloquial usages of theft of abstract things: - Credit card theft (it's really just the number that is "stolen") - Password theft (usually "stolen" during a data breach, more numbers being stolen) - Bitcoin theft (even more numbers being "stolen".) Here's a very simple explanation for this: In common parlance, "theft" generally means taking something of economic value -- either physical, like property, or abstract, like labor -- from someone without giving any value in return against their wishes. If you extend this line of thought, you'll see why IP laws exist and why these abstract forms of theft are illegal. And when examined from that perspective, those coherent reasons are basically just different ways of saying "because I can get away with it."