memes @lemmy.world

1y ago

Don't let the corporations tell you otherwise

330 comments

You seem to be under the impression that people and corporations get equal treatment under the law.
- You seem to be under the impression that they should. At what point does one person's right to get richer override other people's right to have a decent life?
  
  Since that abomination called “Citizens United” was imposed on us decent living people (in the US)
- Well, they do. It's when humans and lawyers get Involved that things become unjust and unbalanced. The law itself is quite clear, otherwise.
  
  I think that's their point, that they don't get equal treatment under the law.
  If a lawyer can twist it around, then we never really had the same protections.

Frankly this catch phrase never made any sense to me, from a logical point of view.
It assumes that:
If buying = owning then pirating* = stealing, because you own it without buying.
And if buying =/= owning then pirating =/= stealing, because you can't own it otherwise.
But the justification in the second statement is completely irrelevant to the first statement. You still own it without buying. It's still stealing.
UNLESS - we examine what "stealing" is. This is where the arguments about being in a digital space vs. a physical space comes in. Where the question is raised: Is making an exact copy really "stealing"? Or, consider what is being "stolen"? The original item? The idea? We need to think about this more.
But it's here the argument should be made and here the debate should be. That's where "pirates" have a chance of winning. Let's get rid of this flawed, easily repeatable, but fundamentally incorrect catch phrase and come up with a better one already. One that makes sense.
*(Nevermind that most of you technically aren't even pirating, you're just downloading the fruits of someone else that pirated.)
- I was locked out of my EA account for half a week due to a bug on their end. I downloaded a game I own(lease?) so I could play over the weekend.
  Is this pirating?
  
  I think you would technically be since what you agreed to by accepting the EULA is that you would have the game on your EA account and would rely on their services to play it, you don't legally have the right to play the game if it's fine into your possession another way.
  And they fit sure have provisions about downtime and access issues in the EULA.
  
  The digital area is something I haven't looked much into so I can't really comment on that but I know regarding physical media the relevant US laws only really make exceptions for things you've done yourself. Just because you own a physical copy of Pokemon Yellow doesn't mean you're allowed to download a copy of it from off the Internet. You're allowed to make and use a backup from a physical cart you own. This is why emulators can't (legally) include ROMs, ISOs, BIOS files, encryption keys, etc. as those are the copyrighted materials that you'll need to make a copy of yourself to legally use emulators.
  To my knowledge (not a lawyer and this is not legal advice) what you did is indeed piracy because you downloaded it. If you had cracked it yourself you probably would have broken some licenses and whatnot that you had agreed to with EA, but I don't believe that would have been piracy.
  Either way EA is very much unlikely to do much anything about it as for the most part the industry only cares about the sources of pirated materials. They generally only ever go after people distributing pirated materials so they'll (legally) attack torrent sites, ROM sites, and other such distributers. The most you're likely to ever get personally is a strongly worded letter (possibly a C&D) to your ISP from some AAA video game company if they notice you seeding a torrent for their game as then you're being a distributer of pirated materials.
  Outside of that I've never heard of them coming after anyone for having the entire collection of GBA titles on their thumb drive or emulating Halo having never owned an Xbox or playing the latest Sim City without always online functionality. I'm not saying it can't or won't happen, but you'd make headlines if it did.
- I think the problem is that theft is the wrong crime to compare to. Piracy is more akin to toll skipping.
- I don’t think the phrase supposed to be a logically consistent justification, but rather a way to voice their discontent with/encourage opposition to the increasing degree of control that corporations exert over products you supposedly “bought” from them.
  It hasn’t been possible to take full ownership over purchased media since the dawn of copyright law—buying a book doesn’t mean you can run it through a photocopier and sell it at the nearest flea market, after all. Even so, it wasn’t until the advent of software licenses that this rhetoric became popular, as you literally cannot “own” a piece of media that is only available through licensing. Licenses are also largely unregulated: while you were always bound by relevant laws, you are now also bound by the terms of the license, in which the licensor often reserves the right which often reserves the right to change the terms or terminate the license as they see fit. As if relentless regulatory capture was not enough, corporations have engineered a world in which you are effectively at their mercy, and a lot of people are understandably upset by this. So, if these people are deprived of any legal means of owning the media they wish to own, they resort to piracy. Of course this isn’t “justified” in the traditional sense, as stealing something that isn’t for sale is still stealing, and authors/publishers/etc. are not obligated to sell their works, but to them it doesn’t matter, as the underlying social contract of media creation and distribution has been violated.
- What field uses =/= to mean !=?
  
  It's a shorthand way of writing ≠ digitally without needing to know the alt code or where it is in your mobile devices keyboard
  
  != isn't universal, i've mostly seen it used in programming.
  Otherwise ≠ is the symbol we use in maths and generally the more common one.
  =/= is just the worst rendition of ≠ for people that don't know how to write it or are too lazy to go find it.
- I like this! Would I be able to bother you to post this to https://lemmy.ca/c/actual_discussion
  I feel it would be a really worthwhile topic to dig into and you've articulated it well!
  
  Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !actual_discussion@lemmy.ca
- If buying = owning then pirating* = stealing, because you own it without buying.
  This isn't the point being made, and I think why you think it's illogical
  Theft requires you deprive someone of an item, not that you get something without buying it. If your definition of theft were accurate then getting a free game would be piracy, which is silly
  UNLESS - we examine what "stealing" is
  Theft of a persons property without intent to return. Legally piracy and theft are different, not just semantically. There's no discussion to be had about what stealing is as it's not what's happening

Piracy technically isn't stealing, it's intellectual property reproduction license violation. Clever bastards those lawyers. You basically don't purchase the music, you purchase the right to reproduce it for non-commercial purposes.

It's important never to forget who sets the terms of commerce, wages, and employment.
All the peasants can do is game the terms they set. And the owner class that sets those rigged terms, and their doting class traitor sycophants, rage against even that.
"you you you... You're just supposed to eat cat food in the dark crying if you can't afford to enjoy life, while we laugh about your subsistence at the country club! No fair!"

Now... Wait.
Is the argument here that something must be owned to be stolen? I don't think ownership is contested, just who is the owner. Or is the argument that pirating also isn't owning... Or... What? Just tit for tat and it looks like the thoughts should be related somehow? I'm all for sailing the high seas and for right to repair / software ownership, but the two concepts are independent as far as I can see.
Idk, if I'm going to try to reproduce this mental gymnastics I should really stretch first: I don't want to pull something and end up a sovcit.
- This saying / idea sprang out of folks losing content they "bought" via online platforms.
  Basically the letter from Sony(?) Said that due to licensing rights content was going to be removed from their servers.. and that the items you bought were no longer available.
  So.. essentially nothing on a digital platform is ever purchased . It's just leased until the platform owners decide to alter the deal. And such, if you can't actually buy it... Are you actually pirating it?
  
  Licensed, specifically a unilaterally revocable and non transferable licence to view personally. Leasing implies recurring payments, and some areas allow lease assignments and other consumer protections that aren't afforded to licensing.
  
  Yes, you are actually pirating it lol.
  Removal/revocation without violation of terms of service is bogus, but you enjoy a product without contributing a share of the cost to develop or keep developing. Getting gouged is absolutely aggravating and consumers are being taken advantage of, but we all have the option of not buying.
  I can also see reasonable situations for removing content, but not "just because" and certainly not indefinitely for everyone.
- They just don't want to consider that it's possible to steal from the people who made the game even if paying for it doesn't guarantee you'll own it forever.
  
  The copyright troll known as "publisher" just will pocket all money you think you paid to people who made the game.
- Nah bro, piracy because we don't wanna pay.
  
  We don't mind paying. If it is actually owning and convenient.
- The idea is that people buy a cd but record companies and some trolls want to make you believe you dont own whatever is on it just a license which is mental gymnastics. You are right.
  
  Are you saying buying a song and buying the rights to a song are the same? That would be a pretty smooth brain statement.
  If you are saying that your personal and non-commercial use is just a license in that it is in any way revokable after purchase, then yes I agree with you.
- Digital products don't cost anything to produce many copies of for sale. That's why they can have many deep discounts through the year.
  "Piracy" word is unfitting actually but it's overused by distributors. "Ownership" is unfitting too, but it comes to mind by default when we talk about paying. You either receive a product that you can use indefinitely or a service that you can use indefinitely. That's about it.
  Problem though, is that products almost consistently aren't delivering on quality expectations as of lately. Or they contain some artificial restrictions/defects that impact the product value in end users' eyes. Or they can randomly stop working at all. The list can go on.
  In the end, it's not that pirates don't want to pay for stuff. It's that they are not allowed to pay as little as they deem adequate for the quality of the product they get.
  The ultimate reason behind everything is people's wish to be able to use stuff they paid for. Indefinitely where possible. And because the product is good enough most of the times.
  Piracy was never stealing, because potential purchase can't be stolen since it's not happened yet, and any pirate using a product without paying for it can be equal to that potential purchase. The new catchphrase is just a convenient way to remind distributors that they need to provide on value and quality and stop blaming someone for their failure to meet their financial goals.
  
  Some of what you say is true but I still don't think there's any A implies B. Quality does seem to be down, prices and DLC are up, and some older content just isn't available for purchase at all.
  Some of this is bogus though. It doesn't cost any money to make a digital copy, but it costs a LOT of money to make the original. This is like R&D/T&E cost for any manufactured product, so to call it "free" is a little disingenuous. I also agree I agree I don't want to pay full price, but the "potential purchase" is horseshit. If you walk into a department store and pick up a shirt (even if stock is infinite) because you want it but don't think it's cheap enough, that's theft. Sure you can come back when it's on sale and buy it, but a purchase/payment is transactional: if you don't uphold your end, that's not a transaction. Last, while some of us DO just want a way to pay and own in a legit way, you can look at replies to the last comment and find a 1 in 5 example of "I'm never paying, I want it for free" which jacks the prices for the rest of us even if we are just paying a fair share of up front cost.
- It's because people do not want to pay creatives because you can't physically touch stuff creatives produce.
  
  Are they being paid now? There are about 9 Walmart workers for every professional writer in the US.
- Don't worry, you are on the path. If you are asking these questions you are miles, or kilometers, ahead.

You can pare this down significantly. Piracy isn't theft. They are different things.

Imagine if we could hook up Bittorrent and Bitcoin somehow, and made it so you could create a torrent of your work and get some money when people download.
And then people who seed it could maybe get a little cut for helping to host things. And you'd buy tokens and you'd know that almost 100% of the money goes to the artist, and the artist has control over the entire process.
That would be neat, but I'm sure someone here will explain why this is unworkable and stupid. Which is why I posted it.
- Imagine YouTube reposts stealing merger ad revenue but it's your main revenue instead.
  
  That's definitely a hard problem we'd have to solve.
- 🤔
- Eight hours later, and no one disagreed.
  I think you might be on to something
  
  Drugs.
- 99% of revenue would go to the first copycats that can feasibly pretend the works are theirs, and dominate the space with their own seeder bots.
  Democracy is nice, but…it needs a bit of regulation and enforcement. You’d end up slowly building up a lot of the rules that currently dictate digital purchases, sans corruption.
- Good luck doing that with current laws and what happens if the artist doesn't want to share their work anymore?
  What's funny is that in theory NFTs could have been used for something like that (proof of ownership of a digital good that can be resold), the problem being that you will rely on a third party platforms to authenticate and download the things you own as it can't realistically be stored on the blockchain...
- You don't need special digital scam money to do this. You can just go buy the thing directly from the creator/the creator's agent. If the creator wanted to go through the trouble of self-publishing, they'd have just done that.

Most of the back and forth is predicated on the idea that the digital world works the same as the digital one. It does not!
In the physical world you cannot produce and exact copy of something for zero dollars.
In the digital world you can make many copies at effectively zero cost.
Stealing, theft, is predicated on taking something from someone so they no longer have it.
Making a digital copy does not steal or remove access.
The whole argument, which I would posit is deeply flawed, is that pirating removes imaginary potential profits for reselling the thing copied (not stolen). If that's so then prove it. Prove that at some point in the future I, or any other given person, would have bought that digital thing. Unless you've invented time travel you just can't.
Copying digital content isn't theft and pirating isn't the right thing to call it.
We have to figure out how to better frame or address the digital world that just fundamentally doesn't operate the same as the physical one.
- So just like you can't prove that none of the pirates would have bought it if pirating didn't exist? But which is more likely, that sales would stay the same or that more people would buy the products if piracy didn't exist?
  You're not entitled to the fruit of someone's labor without compensation or their consent, even if you pinky swear that you'll compensate them at a future date.
  
  At face level you would expect that, but a lot of the people I know that pirate do it to that way they can see how the game or movie is and then if they like it they buy it afterward. Game Demos are rarely a thing nowadays and otherwise they just wouldn't have bought it in the first place. Under this scenario they are actually gaining more profit than if they were to heavily combat, but corporations/non-indie studios are shortsighted and would rather chase a fictional lawsuit case then actually make a profit.
  
  As soon as you release something to the world, you have given up some control over the thing- otherwise, people would have to come to you to see/hear your art, which would limit the profits considerably.
  
  I suppose we should just start throwing people "likely" to do crimes in prison preemptively!? That's not how anything else works. Why would it work like that here?
- "Stealing, theft, is predicated on taking something from someone so they no longer have it."
  So if I purchase a product and then its taken away due to service closure or 'updated' to be so different as to no longer be recognisable that would be theft surely.
  
  Yes.
  
  What you pay for through platforms is a limited usage license. Get a physical copy or just buy DRM free games if you want to own them
- The concept you bring up applied before the digital world took off as well.
  For those of us who were around when the whole "YoU WoULdN't StEaL a CaR!" argument against piracy was being made, it was a false equivalency when it came to ownership back then too.
  Copying a song off the radio onto a tape cassette was not the same as breaking into a car, hot-wiring it, and driving off in it. Someone copying a song from the radio onto a cassette was not preventing others from listening to it.
  Yes. This is not about theft. It's about intellectual property rights and royalties via cloning a non-physical creation. They just masquerade it as theft because it helps their argument. It's disingenuous of them.
  
  Then wage theft isn't theft because you never were in possession of the money so it wasn't stolen from you.

If buying isn't owning,
Then it's time to get communism

This must be why blockbuster failed, people just grabbed whatever and left saying it’s not stealing because blockbuster lets them rent it

Stealing a rental car is still car theft.
- Bad comparison.
  It’s more like buying a car, driving it for two years, then the manufacturer decides they no longer want to support the car so it auto drives off in the middle of the night
  No you can’t have a refund
  
  Don't even need the auto drive off aspect.
  A better comparison is where the car will no longer start no matter what you do to it. But you own the body/frame.
  
  But like if someone stole it in those two years it would still be theft.
  It's a perfect comparison, it's just not proving what you think it's trying to prove. It's proving that the If/Then statement is wrong and makes no sense if you think about it. It's not proving that piracy is theft.
  Piracy isn't theft, but this isn't why.
- If the rental car was advertised as a car you can own, you paid the price for owning the car and they get you on the fine print. No sir, then its not theft.
- Making exact copy of rental car is not.
  
  Fuck yeah I would download a car
- In the same way that taking a photo at a museum is theft
- I mean yeah, but digital copies of something are definitely different then a literal car.
  
  Yeah, if they could print effectively infinite copies of the car at almost zero cost then it would be comparable
  
  They sure are!
- No one expects to be the owner of a rented car. That why people ask "are you the home owner or a renter?"
- Do you go to a car store and pay full price to have the car in your car library indefinitely before having the dealer come say "sike, we're taking that back"?

Buying something is owning. That has never changed.
You don't purchase digital goods. You buy a license to use them, under the conditions you agreed to. Piracy explicitly breaks those conditions 99.9% of the time.
So no, it isn't stealing. It's just plainly illegal. And it hurts everyone from the original artist to the multi-billion dollar company that distributes it. Whether you think that is immoral or not is up to you.
- Yes, that is the small text they use to justify it, but that's not how they advertise it. When Amazon Prime wants me to pay for a movie it doesn't say "License it now!" It says "Buy it now!"
  If you go digging into the EULA you'll see it being called a license, but no effort is made to actually make that clear to the customer.
  Furthermore, being technically legal doesn't make it acceptable. If someone opened a bookstore, and put some treatment on all their books that caused them to suddenly disintegrate after a year, it doesn't matter if they have on all their receipts that "books are not guaranteed to last longer than a year" or that they "aren't doing anything illegal". It's still a bullshit business practice that shouldn't be tolerated.
  
  When it says "buy it" you asuume the it refers to the content - they'd probably argue it refers to the license.
  
  You can buy those movies on physical medium though.
  
  Yes, scams exist. I never claimed that things like your hypothetical situation would be moral, or should be tolerated.
  
  Were you under the impression that Amazon was going to assign you the copyright to the song or movie that you purchased? No? Then you understood that you were buying a license and you're just playing pretend about the confusion.
- Hahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahaha.
  Bro is just incredible how there is people defending this multibillions dollars companies. The studios don't care about the author or the creator. They don't care about the actresses or the singers. They don't care about you as the consumer of this media. They only care about PROFIT.
  Sources :
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Hollywood_labor_disputes
  https://apnews.com/article/actors-strike-ends-hollywood-5769ab584bca99fe708c67d00d2ec241
  https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/17/business/hollywood-actors-sag-aftra-strike-by-the-numbers/index.html
  As you can see these executives are not compensating the actors , the writers. The actual creators of these movies and series you said " wE sHoUldN't pIrAtE" are not even getting their good deal and let's not talk about the music industry which is the same or worst situation for the creators.
- I don't see how piracy hurts anyone.
  Some pirates just want a free demo before they buy it, others pirate stuff they already bought for convenience reasons, or decide to pay for a license if they like it and want to support the creators, and the third type of pirate never would've bought anything to begin with, so no lost sales in any conceivable way.
  
  So it doesn't hurt the content creator because a minority of pirates actually compensate them for their work?
  If piracy didn't exist at all the "never would've bought it" people wouldn't have a choice but to compensate the content creators in order to enjoy their work. They probably wouldn't buy all the content that they consume at the moment and would instead be playing less games or watching less movies, but they would still be doing something with their free time and money and it would profit others (and potentially themselves).
  
  Yes, there's a million reasons to rationalize piracy to yourself.
  I think it's fair to say that, at least occasionally, one of those reasons isn't true and it hurts the creator.
- We have another one.
  Slavery used to be legal. So it was okay?
  Right now „selling“ stuff and saying its just a license you fool is legal so it is okay?
  
  That is a false equivalence, and I think you know that.
  
  What's funny about your bad equivalency is that pirating is treating the people who created the content as slaves since you're enjoying the fruit of their labour without compensating them.

An unfunny meme - ah - the OP is German. Nevermind. Do carry on.
- It's not like memes have to be funny.
  
  In this case it would help if it at least was right.

This topic is so stale
- Please explain to me how a lack of ownership over things that you buy is a stale topic?
  Has this been solved in a meaningful way? Is the problem getting better?
  
  No, but repeating the same phrase in memes all over Lemmy for 862nd time doesn't make anything to solve the problem, it just irritates many.
  Absolute majority of Lemmyverse is already in favor of piracy, it's a circlejerk, move on.
  
  How is it not stale? The inaccurate and dishonest framing of a situation from this meme isn't going to convince anyone of anything.
  Nobody gets charged with theft for downloading movies and music. They get hit with copyright infringement. Doesn't matter if you buy physical media that you owned or digital media that you licensed, either way you never purchased the copyright.
- As the guy who started this meme, I totally never get tired of seeing it.

Ignoring all options to actually buy something to pirate something because you also find offers were you can rent it is just a capitalist mindset. Denying workers money because you want stuff as cheap as possible.
- I'm sorry, but did I lay off a thousand people despite record profits?

BRB in my to keep a rental car without paying.
- "Piracy isn't stealing? Does that mean stealing also isn't stealing? Checkmate!"
  
  I'm not owning the car after payment. And I have to follow criteria when using the car.
  So why is that not ok?
- Shhh... Some people read the post and think it makes some logical sense.

If house owning isn't housing, shoplifting isn't shopping
- No no. Pirates live on boats. And piracy isn't ownership of a house. Which is where lots of people do lifting...
  Just, ah, sigh, don't make me tap the sign again.

330 comments