I think the jury is still out on copyright infringement. I think it may be a net benefit to society, although a negative for copyright holders.
Back in the Napster days I bought so much more music based on stuff I downloaded. Not everyone was like me, buty piracy made money for the record industry.
I also think copyright infringement has allowed lots of knowledge and entertainment to be available to low resource markets that would never attract releases. How many young people in Lagos got software and media only through piracy?
I challenge you to demonstrate that copyright infringement per se is bad for society. This would mean copyright is good for society which is still to be proven at least in it's current acception.
As part of society. Piracy is pretty good for me. Paying for DRM-infested media and fragmented streaming services on the other hand is bad for society.
Some people we're never and are never going to pay for some of the they consume, they'll either pirate it or just not consume it.
I'm presently watching Avatar: The Last Airbender. Which I just pirated earlier today. I'm never going to our-right buy, nor rent, it.
One season is presently on Netflix here in Australia, so I'll watch that there, and the publisher will get their three cents out of me via Netflix, or whatever Netflix pays.
That's three cents they were otherwise never going to get out of me.
If the content was available at a reasonable price, say some portion of what I pay my ISP and the AU$8 I pay the VPN service to hide my traffic from my surveillance-state ISP, I'd pay it.
But it isn't, and I can't afford to pay for all the content I consume on my trifling skilled-tradesperson wage.
You realise when people like me see job ads for doctors getting paid in a day what I earn in a fortnight, and revenue figures like:
The Last Airbender had grossed $131,772,187 in the United States, and $187,941,694 in other countries, making for a total of $319,713,881 worldwide.
... there's no way you're going to convince me this side of the heat death of the universe that copyright infringement in universally bad.
While literally true; I have always found this argument to be petty and pedantic.
I’ve heard every argument in the book; but even the old ads said ‘you wouldn’t steal ____’.
The fundamental principle is so similar to the point that discussing it quickly devolves into pedantry.
I am one that has had this discussion probably a dozen times; half of those on this forum, and I’ve just decided to stand by my educated opinion that it’s absolutely a type of theft.
It's not pedantic at all. If we could copy-paste food, clothes, etc. for free, theft would be very different.
Or maybe not, I can just about imagine a bunch of suits suing Jesus for multiplying bread to feed the poor because it deprived them of their baked good sales revenue.
Maybe a very distorted type of theft but from my perspective the main immoral thing about theft is that it deprives someone of what they used to have, or takes the place of a sale. From the limited research I've seen the evidence is, at best, mixed that corporations are losing sales due to piracy.
If it was a clear choice between buying something or pirating it, equating piracy with theft would be more reasonable (though the owner still has their good so not entirely identical) but that doesn't seem to be the typical scenario. The ads only make that equivalence because it's better for the companies if they convince people it's theft.
From a moral perspective I think whether it is theft really depends on your motivation/what you would do in the absence of piracy.
> the main immoral thing about theft is that it deprives someone of what they used to have
You should have just stopped there. That "or takes the place of a sale" rider is a very recent invention. You know what else takes the place of a sale? Spending your time doing anything else and ignoring the fact that the work even exists. If I could have paid to listen to a song from artist A and instead I listen to a song from artist B (free or paid, but we'll assume it was with permission either way) then that "takes the place of a sale" for artist A, but there's absolutely nothing immoral about choosing to listen to artist B's song instead. Or reading a book, or sleeping, or whatever. You could even write your own songs and give them away for free, directly competing with artist A and taking the place of many sales, and there still wouldn't be anything immoral about that. Artist A was never guaranteed sales, so they haven't lost anything simply by not making a sale. They still have their copy of the work, so they have not in fact been deprived of anything.
Complaints about piracy always read to me as: "You aren't complying with this monopoly which was promised to us in a rather one-sided deal with a third party (government) which (unilaterally) claims to represent you. If you don't shape up—or even if you do—we intend to sue you for everything you own in courts run by our beneficiaries and otherwise do whatever we can to ruin your life, just on general principles and not because we suffered any actual damages." And yet they have the audacity to pretend to claim the moral high ground…
Furthermore, by the way, theft typically destroys total value. If someone steals a wallet (or anything really), the amount he gets from fencing it is typically much smaller than the cost (including hassle, time spent, and potentially nostalgic value) to the original owner of replacing everything (if that’s possible at all).
Copyright infringement, by contrast, arguably creates value - instead of one person being able to see the movie, two can see it.
If I don't watch your movie or watch it for free, it doesn't change anything for you (I'd even argue that the later might actually be better for you, but that's another topic)
On the other hand, whether I eat your apple or not make a big difference to you, since you might not be able to eat it in one scenario.
The ads that infringed the copyright of a small music creator ... when the execs of the companies that paid for the ad go to jail for conspiracy to commit theft I'll change to using your wrong terminology.
