Pluralistic: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing"
The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you've already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations.
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Digital distribution is a service. You can steal a service.
If you fuck a prostitute and then don't pay them, you are stealing from them.
If the prostitute uses a technique, and then you use the same technique without paying hem for reuse, is that stealing or does their direct involvement matter?
If you’re going to retype the code of a program from scratch, then your analogy is valid. If instead you are taking the production created through someone else’s labor without compensating them, then you are stealing from them.
Stop reading my comments if you aren't going to pay me.
Prostitutes don't become prostitutes because they know secret techniques.
The metaphor is describing the service provided, and that not paying for said service is indeed stealing.
Trying to make it a different metaphor requires a new framework from you, because you copying their actual service would be you pimping them, under this metaphor.
Someone sharing content on a peer to peer distribution network is not using the digital distribution service of whoever sold the content. They are not 'stealing' HBOs bandwidth to share Game of Thrones.
They are sharing a thing that they initially paid for from HBO at no cost to others, similar to letting your friends watch it with you on your TV at the same time. The only difference is scale.
HBOs service is "provide access to GoT"
If you provide access to GoT, by acquiring their content and then redistributing it, you are stealing the same way you pimping your prostitute is stealing.
Idk why people here love stealing but hate admitting it. It's fuckin weird. Like the literal word used is "piracy" for shits sake lol
Piracy is used to equate copyright infringement with theft.
Is drawing your own Mickey Mouse and selling it theft? You did all the work and took nothing from Disney.
If you make a copy of Mickey Mouse at no cost to Disney and sell it, is that theft? You took nothing from Disney.
If you have a really good hamburger at McDonald's, make your own copy and sell it at your stores is it theft? No, and that is where the Big Mac came from, a copy of someone else's work.
Copyright infringement is not theft. Not all copies of something are copyright infringement. Pimping someone is human trafficking, not theft.
You're not using their distribution service when you pirate something. That's the whole point.
It's okay I won't use their digital distribution system to pirate their stuff.
It's just like falling to pay a prostitute you never fucked