this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2024
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Exactly. If I stole an item that belongs to you, I'm denying you the possession of that item, and you'll either have to acquire another one, steal it back, or just not have it at all. When someone commits an act of digital piracy, they aren't denying anyone the possession of it, therefore it isn't the same as stealing.
Calling it theft is, in my opinion, emotionally manipulative and prevents any serious discussion on the ethics of piracy.
Even the word piracy is a bit suspicious to me; original pirates robbed ships in international waters and were considered enemies of mankind, so calling a much lesser act piracy sounds very manipulative... I wonder where the word piracy was first used to describe copyright violations, can't seem to find anything about it.
Piracy was used as far back as the 1700s to refer to illegal copies of books or unauthorized publishing outside of publishing monopolies. In general, I get the feel of breaking monopolies, turning to less savory methods to get what is owed, and liberating goods from the hands of wealthy hoarders.
For a while, the U.S. publishing industry was based on pirating British books, many of which were previously pirated from France. The only significant difference between the usages is the freeing of information vs keeping goods for oneself.
That's interesting and informative, thank you.
The theft is monetary and the creator and distributor of what's being pirated are the victims, it's not theft in the sense that you're taking something from someone and they don't have access to it anymore, they can still sell copies, by not paying for it what you're stealing is the money that should have been transferred to them.
What I'm saying is that this isn't theft, I'm not saying there is no harm in piracy, but there is a clear difference. When you steal something from a store, they would need to acquire the merchandise again to restock, as well as being denied the money that item would have otherwise be sold for.
I'm not saying piracy is victimless, or that it is ethical, but it's clearly a different level of crime, so it should not be called theft.
By this logic wage theft isn't theft since the employee never had the money in their possession.
Let's exaggerate things. An indie dev sells a game for 5$ and when all things are split up they have 2$ going to them. They sell one copy but with the tracker they put into the game, they can tell that there's a million person that have played it. Their income for the work they put in is 2$, a million -1 people got to enjoy what they created through piracy. So you're telling me, no one has stolen anything from that creator?
Wage theft is different from piracy. When you work for an employer, you are giving them hours of labour in exchange for the compensation, I have a limited amount of labour hours to use in my lifetime, whereas copying a work can be done an infinite amount of times without requiring an additional labour time to recreate it.
I'm not saying that piracy is ethical, there are many cases where it is unethical, but it is not theft.
Right, because content appears out of thin air.
I'm not saying that piracy is ethical, but it isn't theft.
From the point of view of the person that should be compensated in order for you to have access to the content, it absolutely is.
in wage theft, there is an agreement about getting paid, and the employer fraudulently does not pay that. I have no such agreement with ubisoft or blizzard.
Ok, but you acquiring content through piracy also is fraud and also makes you acquire something someone worked for without compensating them when the agreement they had with society in general was that they would make their creation available in exchange for money.
But hey, social contract, who needs that? 🤷
>acquiring content through piracy also is fraud
letting someone share a song with you is not fraud
It is if the person sharing it isn't the original creator, they do it in a way that makes it so you're now in possession of the content and they do it without the creator's approval.
You guys are so good at mental gymnastics, you should use some of that energy to understand laws and to think about more than your self interest.
copyright is immoral.
Theft is not monetary because you didn't take money away from the creator, hence there's no "theft" in strict meaning of the word. It's like saying you stole money from the store because you didn't pay for the apple. You stole the apple, but not the money. Except in digital world, store would be able to duplicate the apple infinite amount of times, so intellectual property is not missing on the author's part, you just violated the law because you used it without compensation.
I understand the angle you are coming from, you are seeing it as potential income you have now prevented the creator from earning and phrasing it as theft.
Also, arguing about all of this is pointless, especially online. That's why lawyer is a life calling and not something anyone can just do as a hobby. Written law is always different from interpreted law and lawyers will try to twist and wiggle around meanings of words as much as possible, which is also the reason why agreements and contracts are written in such a way.
Then as I mentioned again and again, wage theft isn't theft because you never had the money for it to be stolen from you.
And am not sure lawyers classify it as such either.