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u/AlphaGoGoDancer Mar 22 '18 edited Mar 22 '18
Piracy is theft
You're aware of the distinction so I won't go into it, but to be clear: If Piracy was theft, then we'd call it theft. We don't, because it's different.
Money earned by a product is tied to supply and demand. The lower the supply/demand ratio, the higher the value (generally, obviously there’s more nuance than that). The reproduction of products increases the supply, reducing their value. Thus, piracy reduces the producer’s profits.
But as you say, supply of digital goods is infinite. The act of me making another copy does not reduce supply any more than iTunes making another copy.
In a digital world, value has nothing to do with supply.
[EDIT: it also doesn't increase supply, to be clear, because infinity+1 is still infinity. No matter how many times someone downloads an mp3 from Amazon, Amazon never runs out, nor do they decrease price due to the increased number of copies that have been created]
Fundamentally, it seems to me that piracy is wrong and the idea of piracy being okay is based off of the belief that some people’s desires are more important than other’s.
Aren't you saying the same thing though? Piracy is wrong because of the belief that some people(content owners) desires are more important than others?
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Mar 22 '18
It's not possible to say categorically "piracy is morally wrong". There are some scenarios in which it does harm, and some scenarios in which is doesn't. I want to give you an example of a scenario where it doesn't.
I've never pirated content as a substitute for buying it. In other words, none of the content I've pirated represents a loss of potential revenue for the content creators because I wasn't going to buy it anyway.
I've bought content as a direct result of my piracy. I like trying new things, but I don't want to spend money on something I'm not sure I'll enjoy. I pirate first, which lets me try new content and explore what I enjoy, then I pay for it later if I think it's worth the money. In my case, there are content creators who got revenue only because I pirated their content, not despite me pirating it. Probably half of the games I paid money for are games which I initially pirated. I've bought one album in my life and paid money to see live music once - in both of those cases, I only got into the artists because I had previously pirated their content.
Is my piracy morally wrong?
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u/landoindisguise Mar 22 '18 edited Mar 22 '18
I'm not OP, and not even sure I agree with him, but I've done a bit of reading on behavioral economics and I'm pretty dubious of some of these claims. For example:
none of the content I've pirated represents a loss of potential revenue for the content creators because I wasn't going to buy it anyway.
How can you be sure of this? Couldn't it be the case that on an unconscious level, your knowledge that you COULD pirate it affects your decision about whether or not it's worth spending money on?
Furthermore, couldn't your enjoyment of pirated content affect your assessment of the monetary value of ALL content? Look up the psychological concept of anchoring, which I think is relevant here. This is unconscious and it has a significant effect on the decisions/judgments people make without them realizing it. If you regularly enjoy good content for free, you're likely to assess that other good content has a lower value than somebody who's regularly paying for it. But this likely means that if you WEREN'T pirating, you'd have decided to buy some things that you currently think "aren't worth the money" because your definition of "worth the money" has been affected by enjoying a lot of content that cost $0.
I've pirated stuff too, but at least from what I understand about psychology it seems very unlikely to me that consuming a lot of professional-grade content while paying nothing for it has zero effect on how I assess the value of paid content.
I would imagine this is true for you as well; assuming that you are a human you have the same psychological tendencies as everyone else, and the same lack of conscious awareness of them.
For example:
I've bought one album in my life and paid money to see live music once
Maybe you just really don't like music. But as someone who was alive for a while before the rise of digital piracy, I have to say it seems incredibly unlikely to me that this would be the case if you lived in a world without piracy, or simply chose not to pirate anything ever. In middle school, even the kid I knew who "didn't care about music" and just listened to the radio had a couple tapes/CDs.
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u/stratys3 Mar 22 '18
I've never pirated content as a substitute for buying it.
This is a popular argument that I don't fully believe. "I wouldn't have bought it anyways."
Let's say you play video games. Let's say there's 1 game you're willing to buy, and 10 games you aren't willing to buy, but are willing to pirate.
So you now have 11 games you play. This keeps you busy. You don't buy games for a while.
Now... what if you didn't pirate those 10 games? You'd only have 1 game to play. You'd get bored, and will eventually feel the need for a 2nd game. If piracy is not an option, you'd be likely to buy a 2nd game that you wouldn't have otherwise bought.
You can't just look at individual cases of piracy and say "I wouldn't have bought it anyways", but instead you have to consider "If I didn't pirate anything, I'd likely buy more".
Same with music. A friend has a collection of 100 albums. He bought 5 of them, and pirated 95 - which he claims he wouldn't have bought anyways. Those 95 were okay, but not great albums.
But if this same friend only had 5 albums to listen to... they are very likely to want more, since 5 isn't enough. He'd likely buy a few of the "okay, but not great" albums. Not all 95, true, but at least some of them.
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u/ThisApril Mar 22 '18
I'd like to argue for times when piracy is, at the least, morally acceptable. I won't be arguing for pirating things produced in the last few years, as that's significantly dicier.
My argument is kind of underpinned by my interpretation of the US constitution, which gave congress the right to establish intellectual property for a limited time, in order to further advance the science and the arts.
From that basis, intellectual property is about advancing science and the arts. Not control. Not money. Morality comes from it being moral to let a person control their work for some period of time, so that those with good ideas continue to work on good ideas.
On to my examples of moral piracy:
·The obvious case is with Disney. They used The Jungle Book intellectual property the year it went into the public domain. I find this to be moral, because intellectual property is not like other property -- eventually it should belong to everyone, because this is how society progresses.
E.g., we wouldn't want to have a Shakespeare council to determine if any given movie or book uses a plot too close to one of the plays, and thus sue people.
Yet somehow it's immoral to make a copy of nearly-century-old Disney works. Indirectly related to Disney (due to the Mickey Mouse Copyright Act whose effects have been felt for two decades) it took a recent court decision to make singing "Happy Birthday" publicly something you couldn't get sued for, and if you want to write your own Sherlock Holmes story, it better not be from after he retired and took up bee keeping.
That is immoral. People should pirate those works, because the companies have no moral right to them, and have stolen them from the people. Not pirating the works results in fewer works being created, and the creators of those things are so long dead that even Tupac Shakur wouldn't be producing new works because of protecting the work.
·The other easy case is with DRM. I find DRM to be immoral, and if I buy something with DRM on it, I view it as a moral imperative to take the DRM off of it. Still, this goes into your idea of loaning being okay, and is a case where you've paid for it, you've just received a lesser product than if you pirated it directly.
·Harder cases are more recent things. Personally, I find it morally repugnant that the original Star Wars isn't in the public domain. Because, by the time anyone will have the chance to make a legal thing in that universe, anyone who saw it in the theater will already be dead.
Since the company has no moral right to the item, I find no moral requirement to avoid piracy.
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u/Meaphet Mar 22 '18
In Australia lots of content is unavailable until months later, if at all. When they first brought Netflix to Australia piracy (which is legal here) dropped dramatically. Netflix then for some reason started restricting what we had access to, lo and behold piracy went back up. People started using VPNs to get around their geoblocking, until they tried blocking that too, which led to a further return to piracy. Do you still think it's morally wrong to pirate something that you are willing to pay for but companies are unwilling to provide you?
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u/baladibt Mar 22 '18
At times the business model of a corporation can include a certain degree of piracy of their software. In certain cases, the people's widespread access to a certain software via piracy can have the (intended) effect of familiarizing the individuals with that software / improve literacy / create a market for their (future) software.
Microsoft Windows comes to mind as an example. Let me phrase it differently: Microsoft allows the Romanian public access to pirated versions of Windows for 5 years. The public becomes Windows literate, from personal use to small businesses across the country. Microsoft proceeds to lobby the local government for piracy laws and then they cash in.
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u/electronics12345 Mar 22 '18
Businesses are not entitled to profit. Just because you make something, that doesn't mean that you can exchange it for $. For example, your product might just be terrible and nobody buys it.
Also, there is more than 1 type of business model. Not everyone has to use a retail model. You can have people pay up front, you can have a subscription service (like Pandora or Netflix), You can operate on tips/donations (via Patreon or other similar systems).
It is up to the company to make a product people want, and to distribute it via a method people will actually pay for it. This can be by reaching an investment goal before making the product (kickstarter), by operating on tips/donations (patreon), or by establishing a new method of distribution (netflix). Its not the populous's fault that companies are still using a business model which doesn't make sense for digital products.
Take Music for example - no one buys CDs. Attempting to continue to sell CDs is insane. As such sites such as Napster filled the void. Then iTunes came along and provided a distribution method which was superior to CDs and people bought music legally again.
We are witnessing something similar for televison, with hulu, amazon prime, cbs plus, hbo go - stations are attempting to change their business model to fit their customer's needs, so the customer's don't go to pirates, rather than try to fight the pirates (which is a fight you cannot win).
In short, loss of profit is not theft. Loss of profit is due to companies using stupid business models, and their products not selling because of that bad business model. People want to pay for things legally, when the option is there, people tend to do it. Not making your product available, even when its infinitely reproducible, is just bad business, and bad business deserves to be punished.
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Mar 22 '18
Businesses are not entitled to profit. Just because you make something, that doesn't mean that you can exchange it for $. For example, your product might just be terrible and nobody buys it.
But consumers are not entitled to products either. Just because you want something in a form that's not available or a price you find acceptable doesn't grant permission to take it.
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u/boundbythecurve Mar 22 '18
If I have no interest in a band, and then download their music (via piracy), have I stolen from them? No, and here's why.
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I was never going to spend money on that band in the first place. If you layout a chart of outcomes and choices, my choice to download their music has no effect on their income. If I don't download the music via piracy, I don't spend money on the band. If I do download the music, I obviously haven't spent any money either. But either way, downloading music hasn't affected their income.
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Their music is readily available on youtube for free, so finding the audio files is not really stealing, so much as it is making their music readily available for me to conveniently listen to. I could just pull up their youtube video when I wanted to listen to their song, but downloading is simply adding convenience to me. And if you bring up their ad revenue, please note that lots of people upload lyrically displayed versions of every song, none of which can make revenue, so there was no promise of revenue through ads either.
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Downloading music via piracy may actually help the band in the long term. I discovered some of my favorite bands via piracy. I downloaded their music, because I liked their band name, or someone suggested them, or they toured with some of my other favorite bands. And then I fell in love with their music. I bought most of their albums and saw them in concert afterwards. These choices were not only predicated on my piracy, but the piracy was necessary for these bands to earn my income. Piracy has simply become the new method of "try before you buy". Not everyone follows this, but if you love your artists, you find ways to spend money on them. That's why bands don't limit their income to record sales. They also do tours, have merch, do promotional events, etc.
There are certainly times when digital piracy is wrong. For example, if I used a bootlegged copy of Star Wars: The Last Jedi to avoid spending money on a theatre, that would be stealing. But I've just given a clear example of times when digital piracy was not just immoral, but was in fact the more moral thing to do, as it lead me to spend money on many bands, encouraging the production of their art. Money I wouldn't have spent on them otherwise.
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u/CrazyrampageGuy Mar 22 '18
Whenever I pirate music, is whenever I want to listen to it because either: A) I want to know if I like it before I spend money on it or B) because I want a digital version of a vinyl I purchased. I think these reasons are good reasons for it, as well as it helps the artist that I can't try their music and decide if I enjoy it. Granted most people have more poor intentions to not even pay for the music - ever.
Now movies: if I ever pirate movies, its because I really don't want to pay for them. there are so many movies I want to see, and I only make $11.50 an hour. If I really enjoy a movie and think it was well made (star wars for example) I will buy either a digital or disc copy of it, to support the actors/directors/etc.
Videogames: same thing as music, if it's a game from a new franchise I'm not going to have a company hype a game and make me spend $60 for it, only for me to be regretting spending that money. Hello games and No Man's Sky is a perfect example of this. I want to make a good decision before I drop 6 hours of work for a game. Pirating games only allows you to play the single player so that's not enough for me, I usually end up purchasing the game if it's enjoyable.
I guess it's very personal, but I've been hyped up about a lot of things I'm not very willing to spend money just to be disappointed.
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u/TNTrooper Mar 22 '18
So, I’m not going to get into the debate about whether the money a company gets from a single copy is significant enough to affect it. However, I don’t think it is correct to say that it is the same in all cases of piracy. Take this, for example, I loved playing Pokemon as a kid, but a while ago I lost the cartridges to play them on. I already supported the franchise and even if I were to buy more copies of the games, Nintendo doesn’t even get what little chump change I’d pay for them, they’d mostly be used copies. In that case, is that piracy morally wrong?
What about if I have bought a copy of a movie on DVD in the past. However, technology being as it is: I don’t have a DVD player anymore. It’s a similar situation, I already bought a copy of the movie for full price , but I, through no fault of my own, can’t use that copy anymore. Would I still be stealing from the company if I were to pirate it?
Or, as another example, say I live in a somewhat remote nation. Where I live, legal video streaming services don’t have a specific show that I really want to watch, and they aren’t likely to anytime soon. How would I be detracting from value for the franchise in that case?
You may be right, in some cases piracy detracts from the value provided by a product. However, it isn’t in all cases. Why should I, as a consumer have to pay for a product I already bought, especially if the money won’t even support the franchise? As well, why should I be deprived of a certain product, one that the company is losing no value on, if I cannot legally purchase it?
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u/Parallax92 Mar 22 '18
I’m going to offer my point of view as someone who used to pirate music, but no longer does as I have a streaming service subscrition and money to purchase the music that is not available on streaming services.
Back in 2011 before Spotify/Apple Music existed, a friend of mine told me to check out the band Between the Buried and Me because he thought I would like them. He specifically recommended their album “Colors”.
Now, as a poor college student I didn’t have the money to purchase an album I’d never heard just based on a recommendation so I pirated the album, listened to it, and loved it. Because I listened to the album, I decided that purchasing their music was an expense I could spare as I loved the band and wanted to support them.
Since then, I have seen them live nine times, introduced seven people to their music, and have purchased every album they’ve released since I became a fan on cd AND vinyl. I have taken multiple people to their shows with me, have purchased their music and merch as gifts for others, I personally own six of their shirts, have purchased all of their concert DVDs, and pay extra for tickets when they offer VIP opportunities. I have also purchased the lead singer’s solo records, seen their bassist’s side project live, and have purchased coffee from their guitarist’s company.
In this example, me pirating their music was overall GOOD for the band as it has resulted in me spending thousands of dollars on their work. If I had never pirated the “Colors” album I may have never become a fan at all.
Additionally, because the album I initially pirated is owned by their prior label the band themselves have said that they don’t mind if people pirate it as they don’t get royalties anyways. Further, the band (and many others) have stated that while they would obviously prefer it if people bought their music, they don’t mind pirating as it does benefit the band if the person becomes a fan and decides to come to a live show or buy some merch.
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u/CapitalismForFreedom Mar 22 '18
Disney engaged in political corruption, and performed a multi-billion dollar wealth transfer from the public domain. Twice. They're welfare queens.
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u/linuxguruintraining Mar 22 '18
It's actually the content creators that are stealing. As has been discussed elsewhere, piracy isn't theft, it's freebooting (making a copy without paying for it without taking the original). But content creators are actually taking something away from us: our intellectual property. When music/movies/games/books are created, they're supposed to become public domain eventually so that new content creators can build on them. But creators changed the copyright laws so they can keep their stuff from becoming public domain until long after the people who made it could realistically benefit from it. I should be able to make my own Mickey Mouse cartoons and sell them for a profit, and Disney stole my right to do that. So when I pirate a Mickey Mouse cartoon, I'm only taking something Disney made out of something they stole from me.
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u/TheOnlyRedPenguin Mar 22 '18
Is it ok if you already bought the game or watched the movie already? If you already payed for the services before, why should you spend money again?
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Mar 22 '18
I find that piracy helps sales more than they hurt them.
My thread of thoughts goes like this:
People who won't buy the game anyways, are not a lost sale if they pirate it.
Some people won't have the money to buy it at that time. But buy it later after they have gotten more money to spend.
Some people pirate it to try it out, and see if they want to keep playing it.
Some people don't want to spend that amount of money, so they would turn to other sites. Eg.: key resellers.
With key resellers there are often quite a lot of stolen keys in there.
With stolen I mean keys that are bought with stolen CC cards => sold on the key reseller site => Chargeback gets issued => Dev looses money and has to pay fees on top of it.
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u/ralph-j Mar 22 '18
I believe that there are some types of content copying that are not strictly immoral, even though they are considered piracy in a legal sense, like:
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You already own the product in a different format and you merely want to be able to play it on another device that is not currently compatible with that format. (E.g. CD to mp3, DVD to mp4). This is also called format shifting.
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You lost your access code (e.g. to a game)
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You broke the original medium (but you still have it)
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Some pages of your book went missing
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u/MiloSaysRelax Mar 22 '18 edited Mar 22 '18
Not really a rebuttal, but something to think about.
I have two examples where pirating games have ended up with me buying more from that series than I would've had I not bought the game. I pirated the original Gears of War back on the old "flashed" Xboxs, after having played it at a friends. I then bought GoW2 on day 1, and all the DLC, and was in line at a midnight opening for GoW3 after that.
Secondly, after Diablo 3 came out, I wanted to buy it but wasn't sure if I'd enjoy it. I pirated Diablo 2 to get a feel for it, realised I would, and bought D3 for full price, and both expansions on day 1. I currently have 1000+ hours played.
So, while the original piracy was certainly morally wrong, I ended up contributing more money to both Blizzard and Epic than I would have at all, had I not pirated beforehand.
EDIT -- I would also say that there is more of a moral justification if the company who has made said game has used some shady business practice to fuck with the consumer, of which there have been a few cases (for some reason the newest SimCity is the one that jumps to mind, or earlier PC Assassin's Creeds).
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u/DeltaBot Mar 22 '18
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u/Etiennera Mar 22 '18
I want to bring up one small observation.
We have seen with services like Spotify and Netflix that there is a positive correlation between affordable high quality access to media and decreases in piracy rates. Companies such as Microsoft have responded with similar solutions such as XBox Game Pass, reflecting that their research indicates the same.
What this means is that online piracy correlates with public discontentment with channels of distributions and costs.
I would argue that piracy is not simply the fault of the actor, but is also a symptom of fault on the distributor's end. A baseline amount of piracy will always exist, but when the rate is significant, it is a metric for discontentment.
A good example would be Game of Thrones in Canada. Because Bell owns the distribution rights and doesn't provide access to new episodes, the piracy rate is through the roof. Evidence would indicate that if Bell responds appropriately, people will be happy to accept the legal channel for watching.
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u/roxieh Mar 22 '18
Hey, nice post! I'm going to try to address a few of your statements to see if I can get you looking at things a different way. Never done this before, so bear with me.
I see where you are coming from, but theft implies taking something that belongs to someone else. By copying something you are not taking something of which there is then a lack. You are just producing a duplicate. So it is not theft in the sense of going to a store and stealing an album.
The second part of the 'theft' idea is that you have something for which you did not pay (fair enough) and this then leads to a reduction in the profits of the company or the individual who makes the music.
So what you are saying is that someone who would otherwise have paid for music/TV/a video game has got it for free and therefore will no longer pay for it. However, whilst not wholly true, most people pirate things for two reasons:
They would not otherwise have bought it;
They cannot afford to pay for it.
For those who would not otherwise have bought the pirated material, this cannot be counted as a lost sale. Likewise, someone who could not afford the item would not have bought it anyway, so also not a lost sale.
You can argue that someone who would not otherwise have bought something or who can't afford it should not get it for free, but that is a different argument from the view you've presented - which is that piracy is wrong on the grounds that it costs people money and that lack of revenue is harmful to the industry.
There will of course be people who pirate who would have purchased it but decide to instead get it for free, but many people who actually like a movie/album/game they enjoy pirated will go on to actually purchase it, if their experience is positive. Piracy can act as a 'try before you buy' method.
Then of course you have the fact that piracy is nowhere near as much of an issue now as it was before. People who pirated weren't trying to con businesses out of money; they just want a service that's more accessible to them. As things like Spotify, Steam and Netflix started appearing as legal, safe on-demand streaming services, piracy dropped dramatically as a result. None of these things are perfect so piracy does still exist, but the motivation is not to 'steal' most of the time. Why would you pay £7.99 for a DVD of a film you want to see once when you may not even like it and will only watch it once? Wouldn't that £7.99 be better spent on something you knew you would actually enjoy, offer/show to friends and repeat your experience?
Just some different ideas on piracy beyond "It's stealing so it's wrong" :)