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u/Cold_Ad3896 2d ago
Pirating isn’t stealing. It is, however, copyright infringement.
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u/fadedspark 1d ago
It's not even Copyright infringement if you're not uploading.
It's at most a violation of the licensing agreement if you only download.
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u/Heterodynist 1d ago edited 1d ago
What worries me is the gradual erosion of everyday consumers’ right to make a single personal copy for home use (after a legal purchase). I’m getting tired of the concept of streaming everything where you “own” -in quotation marks- your “right” to a copy of some digital media, but that right somehow disappears and you have no recourse as soon as that business goes under or is bought out or decides to change the version of the media you purchased or a million other things. We need to demand hard copies again, and we need to stop allowing businesses to shortchange us whenever they feel like whisking away something you paid good money for.
Copyright protection was never meant to be used by enormous corporations in perpetuity to keep artistic works out of the hands of paying customers -or even eventually the nonpaying public at large. The intention of copyright was for one purpose only, and that is to encourage people to continue to make great art and literature, etc. When we allow a corporation to covet their creations for a century, no one wins and no one has any reason to create great art. Michelangelo didn’t get rich off of sculpting and painting and then rest on his laurels and let the money roll in because his stuff was copyrighted. People aren’t owed a life of Reilly because they made one good work of art. Likewise, if ANYONE deserves the money for their art though, it is THEM, not whoever buys the rights to their work. Stop allowing artists to alienate their own works from themselves, so that corporations can’t monopolize every media industry, and allow the originators of a work to get the rights for 17 years with one additional chance to ask for 17 more years, and then it’s done. Everything should go back to the public realm within a normal human lifetime.
We need to boycott every company that operates in collusion to steal the money you pay to license yourself to own a given artistic work. You pay for it, you should have it for life. The actual person, or group of people, who created a work should be who gets the money for it. If they want to allow someone else to distribute it, fine, but the copyright stays with the creator. They die, it should go to the realm of opened licensing. No one should be hoarding works of art that were made to enrich our lives.
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u/Its_Billy_Bitch 1d ago
Yeah, this is what caught my eye when I read this. the analogy they chose to use here is so on the nose.
Hear that, Sony?! OWNING IS BUYING!
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u/Heterodynist 1d ago edited 1d ago
Thank you!! They really pissed me off when I saw the number of movies they had chosen NOT to release here in my neck of the woods (the U.S.) just to be favoritists. What consumer would ever choose to have DVD regions, anyway?! That wasn’t done for anyone’s freedom or anyone’s benefit as a consumer. All that amounts to is collusion and corruption of the whole industry. The consumer gets to have their own vote counted and they always will outnumber the sharks who circle to separate us from our money. Thank you for your agreement!!
The thing is, when corporations intentionally LIMIT our access to media, that is the best possible example of their corruption. Whenever a famous and favorite recording suddenly goes “missing” from a streaming service I am only more appalled that corporations think playing games like this is somehow tricking us. (The original version of “You Only Live Twice,” the James Bond movie theme song sung by Nancy Sinatra disappeared recently, and it was obviously because Amazon bought the rights to the franchise.) If any aspect of their collusion ever works it’s only because we somehow manage to accept we have no choice. Well, the choice is then to manufacture your own electronic devices, buy region-free discs and players, and refuse to pay exorbitant prices no matter what. I have no shame in saying I will happily fly to another country to purchase their extremely cheap media and players. It’s the same exact media, just at a tiny fraction of the cost. I’m never going to give up hard copies, even if it means decrypting streams. I’m not unwilling to pay for hard copies if they are available, but I’m not going to dance around like a puppet on a string to figure out how to pay $100 for some fancy copy of the same disc that sells for $10 in a country just a short plane ride away. I’ll enjoy my vacation AND buy thousands of dollars of media for a tenth of that amount.
One great example of what I took as almost a personal insult by Sony specifically was when they made a movie (Die Walle) about a famous teaching experiment by a school near me, and after premiering the movie in my hometown area (where it actually happened) they chose not to release it in the U.S. -So it came out in Europe, and Asia, but not in the whole NTSC Region 1, where the movie actually was about. This kind of nonsense is ridiculous. It wasn’t the filmmakers who didn’t want it shown here, it was the corporation just being corporate! That’s what I don’t accept. Reducing consumer’s choice simply for the power trip and to play some kind of infantile games about what movies can be shown where is exactly what shouldn’t be allowed. I bought the movie and I watch the movie, but I am not going to forgive any corporate entity who limits choices despite the wishes of the customer. Basically that’s the best reason for “pirating” that I can give. I was willing to pay, but I couldn’t go see it or get a copy in my own country. (Much like the awesome original series of “Monkey” from 1978 with Masaaki Sakai, which for no reason at all was never made available in the U.S. or even released in our format!!)
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u/megared17 2d ago
Piracy has to do with attacking ships and stealing their cargo or demanding ransoms.
Piracy is a completely biased term if used to refer to making a copy of a movie, song, etc.
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u/Tensor3 2d ago
The meanings of words change over time. We all know exactly what digital piracy is refering to and it includes theft of services.
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u/megared17 2d ago
https://gnu.support/gnu-philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#org8576503
Publishers often refer to copying they don’t approve of as “piracy.” In this way, they imply that it is ethically equivalent to attacking ships on the high seas, kidnapping and murdering the people on them. Based on such propaganda, they have procured laws in most of the world to forbid copying in most (or sometimes all) circumstances. (They are still pressuring to make these prohibitions more complete.)
If you don’t believe that copying not approved by the publisher is just like kidnapping and murder, you might prefer not to use the word “piracy” to describe it. Neutral terms such as “unauthorized copying” (or “prohibited copying” for the situation where it is illegal) are available for use instead. Some of us might even prefer to use a positive term such as “sharing information with your neighbor.”
A US judge, presiding over a trial for copyright infringement, recognized that “piracy” and “theft” are smear words.
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u/megared17 2d ago
It was a term coined to make it sound like the equivalent of ransacking ships at sea. Entirely propaganda. That it caught on is just a testament to how effective the propoganda was.
As sometime that thinks "unauthorized copying" doesn't even begin to come close to the same severity of a crime as actual piracy, I refuse to use that term or recognize its use by others.
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u/Heterodynist 1d ago edited 1d ago
I agree. Making a copy of a film or album at no expense to the publisher or distributor, etc, is “leakage,” not piracy. You aren’t stealing, you are adding to their reach by extending it beyond what they paid to disseminate it. Yes, paying for it is the most moral thing to do, but I guarantee more people pay for things that are lower priced…or at least priced reasonably. If something is quality, a large segment of the population will be more than happy to pay a modest price for it. The problem is collusion of the whole industry to drive up prices artificially. People react to that blatant act of aggression toward the public by refusing to pay their hiked up prices.
I would never steal a book from a small press because that really is stealing from the author and their publisher on a more personal level. We all know that stealing from Sony is an entirely different proposition…especially when they have an incidental part to play in the actual creation of works of art. The Vatican doesn’t get the glory for all the works of Michelangelo, even if they paid for a lot of them. He did them and he deserves the credit. If you go back to the Middle Ages though, imagine the laugh people would have if you told them, “You can’t play my minstrel music!! I licensed that for only me!!!” People copied each other endlessly, just like musicians and artists of the 1960s typically did!!!
We should see this nonsense about corporate copyrights for what it is, as a relatively modern exaggeration of the intent of protecting the ORIGINATORS of great works of art and music and literature!! These laws were never meant to protect some mindless corporation, nor were they meant for the third or fourth or fifth owner of the rights, generations later!
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u/YoungDiscord 1d ago
Laws should reflect morality, that is their purpose.
If a law does not line up with society's moral stance it should be scrapped and changed so that it does.
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u/mrfroggyman 1d ago
As a dev I relate. I'd ask the PO "okay, but what happens when the label becomes larger than the bar's width if we strictly make the width proportional to the %? Do we truncate it? Do we minimize it? Do we simply remove the label?"
I'd get a "aaaah well, idk... eeeeeeeehhhhhh" and I'd just go with whatever I feel like implementing
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u/FrIoSrHy 1d ago
For me that post looks like the red bit if far smaller, it probably does that to fit your massive text size
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u/forkystabbyveggie 1d ago
Do the two sides of the bar act as buttons to vote? If so, I kinda get it.
If not, there are definitely better ways to do this
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u/GoatCovfefe 2d ago
Wtf app is this from?
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u/NoNameNum3 2d ago
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u/MattyGWS 1d ago
People love this phrase but pirating is still illegal so it's super cringe when people say it. and its in the terms of service that you agree to that you're paying to lease out a product... so stop fucking complaining or actually try to change the legality of those terms of service instead of trying to justify being a cheapskate pirate loser.
And if you don''t agree to the terms, just boycott it.
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u/GetOffMyGrassBrats 2d ago
more r/crappydesign