Piracy is Good: The Moral Imperative of Sharing Knowledge

technomagnus.vercel.app Piracy is Good:The Moral Imperative of Sharing Knowledge

Nature Wants Information to Be Free.

Piracy, in today’s context of unauthorized sharing of digital content, is wrongly condemned as immoral theft. However, it is not piracy itself that is immoral. Rather, it is the greed-driven laws and practices that censor knowledge and creative works to maximize profits. At its core, piracy is about sharing information and creative works with others, which should be seen as a moral good. 🤑

FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH @lemmy.fmhy.ml

Piracy is Good: The Moral Imperative of Sharing Knowledge

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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ @lemmy.dbzer0.com

Piracy is Good: The Moral Imperative of Sharing Knowledge

technomagnus.vercel.app /posts/piracythe-moral-imperative-of-sharing-knowledge

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127 comments

Agree 100% and I've been seeing this "debate" in other instances and communities recently
Piracy is moral and ethical. Small businesses are not the targets. I would download a car, I would download a better life if I could
- You guys are deranged... Every movie you download had huge amounts of work behind it, those people need money too.
  Sure, a studio makes hundreds of millions making a shitty marvel movie, but it does still legitimately cost them tens of millions to make - they just make revolting middle of the road crap so it sells to idiots everywhere.
  That's why there's no good movies any more - it's too risky to tell a good story, now that we're all pirating them
  The instant there's no money in it, you'll see there will be no movies made (and that's precisely why the last 20 years of movies have generally been rubbish).
  The studios are fine, and by all means steal Deadpool 53 or whatever off them, but don't pretend you're being noble in the process.
  At least own up that it's theft.
  Similarly - It takes real skill and experience to make and record music (and if anything that's gotten a while lot cheaper than it used to be!), but the artists that aren't in the radio would be gutted to hear your downloading it.
  That's also why merch is so important to a bands bottom line - it's got away less middle men in the line taking a cut
  
  Theft is when you deprive someone of one of their possessions. How is sharing content the same as doing that? The only "theft" going on here is content producers trying to steal the meaning of the word theft.
  If people need compensation for their content production (and they really should) then that can be provided for by patronage, by donations, by society in general. Putting the round peg of that responsibility into the square hole of each person "consuming" the content makes zero sense in the grand scheme of things.
  
  Businesses who want to make money need a way to make a product that can't be trivially reproduced on any basic computer. Or at least a way to distribute their product more conveniently. Everyone always pointed to how piracy declined when streaming was affordable. That was because it was more convenient to stream than make copies and host content yourself. Now that's reversing again.
  Maybe it will be good if the only movies and music that are made are the ones from people with true inspiration. I wonder if Homer only wrote the Odyssey because he knew the state had strong copyright protections?
  
  @flambonkscious @RedCanasta And the people who made that work earn approximately 0.1% of what you pay for the work. The other 99.9% goes to shareholders. Wouldn't it make more sense to give the workers 100%, or even 10% of the normal price?
  
  I would somewhat agree that pirating a just released movie is an immoral thing, and generally I don't do it. However, the main issue here is the copyright law. Just look at it: content producers almost always are forced to transfer the rights to producers, then they don't get a penny from it. Producers then hold those right for eternity, even though, realistically, you get the most of the profit from a specific content (book, movie, game) in the first year from the release date. I would change copyright law, so that original authors would always have access to revenue and management of the content, and so that the right to distribute would be held for no longer than 3 years (maybe even less). Then it fits perfectly into the paradigm of piracy for the data propagation and conservation

I'm not going to argue for/against the article. However,
we need laws and policies promoting open access and sharing of knowledge, not maximizing profits through contrived scarcity
As a fan of FOSS (and the Open Source community in general), I completely agree with this. Sharing knowledge can do a lot of good.
- Isn't there already laws for that? Fair use being one of them. And I read about some right to archiving too. Which allows archive.orgs efforts.

Copyright has evolved from a limited monopoly on a work of a handful of years, into an entitlement which has diverged sharply from the original intent of the law. It's time to bring the law back into balance with its intentions of promoting the creation of new works, while granting the public free access to those works after a reasonable time. Lifetime plus seventy years is not reasonable.
Edited to add - consider the number of great artists whose works never commercially benefited them. Not because of "piracy", but because their work was not known or recognized. Still, they made their great works because they were compelled to do so by their existence.

How can I pirate Adobe Lightroom, if it's impossible for me to own it by paying for it?
Honestly, I would pay some decent mulah for a standalone current version of Adobe Lightroom that doesn't try to suck me up into the cloud. It's silly event pirators and cracker teams can put a pretty fully featured yearly version, and Adobe does not.

Hard to argue against piracy with the current system of copyright that only serves giant corporations. Guess it's human nature to try to consolidate power...

Ironically, for old stuff at least, Piracy is the only way it's reliably preserved. Even if you do want to buy it new to support the creators, oft-times you can't. It's because I can't buy it that I turn to piracy. Not just for old games, but sometimes old comics and manga too. Occasionally Anime that's no longer licensed or available.
Plus, it's only going to get worse now, with Streaming services and online platforms delisting anything even that might not make a profit because they don't want to pay residuals. I'm not big on pirating new releases, but that's because I think we should support artists. I also think we should call for the creators to be paid more of the profit share vs. the money people at the top who seem to do nothing but fire people and shoot down good ideas to try to make everything the same carbon copy live service.
I also don't have to pirate new stuff, because it'll old stuff on sale at half price (or less) soon enough, and with all the bugs fixed and the features added the way it should have been at launch. My backlog is so huge that I won't have time to go through it anyway before I die. So there's another reason I don't care much about new games. If I'm still interested in them a year or more later when they're on sale and fixed up, I'll buy it then.
As for stuff like Anime and Manga. Anime subscriptions are surprisingly cheap, and so are monthly manga subs if you know where to look. Viz's Shounen Jump ($3) Vizmanga ($2), Azuki.co ($5), Mangamo (also $5 last I checked)... so long as you only subscribe to one at a time and rotate, you'll probably never run out, and it's a lot cheaper than buying it one volume at a time $10 each or whatever.
- Ironically, for old stuff at least, Piracy is the only way it's reliably preserved. Even if you do want to buy it new to support the creators, oft-times you can't. It's because I can't buy it that I turn to piracy. Not just for old games, but sometimes old comics and manga too. Occasionally Anime that's no longer licensed or available.
  'Tis why I'm a data hoarder. Any TV show, movie, album, book, comic, video game (up to the n64 era, I'm not made of money for storage space lol), stand up comedy special, basically anything I've ever enjoyed in my life, I got that shit on disk. Anything 100% irreplaceable is backed up, but otherwise it ain't going anywhere till shit breaks.

Dafuq, man, do whatever illegal activity you want as long as you're ready to face the consequences... But don't pretend you're acting ethically...
I have pirated shit too. Chances they'll catch me are very low, so I don't care. I also target corporations, never small businesses. But pretending I'm a saint because I'm "sharing information"? That's delusional.
At least learn to accept what you are without sugarcoats and coping mechanisms.
- It's only illegal/unethical if you view it from the perspective of capitalism. On most fronts it's actually ethical. I know it's difficult to grasp due to heavy advertisement on IP law, but IP barely provides more than it takes away. Shit 3d printing exploded once IP was no longer in effect. Coronavirus vaccine would be available for 3rd countries (Now they pay way more per shot than they should)
  Not to mention piracy actually preserves media that is culturally significant. (insert monopoly IP story here) Piracy does seem like a way to protest against a broken system.
  
  Except piracy peaks at the recent releases. That isn't about media preservation, it's about seeing the new shit for free.
  For some hard to impossible find stuff it can be useful but that's not what it's mostly used for.
  
  So what you're saying is that people should create content and expect no money in return?
  Please explain why content creators, like Hollywood, would create content they can't monetize.
  Software developers should work tirelessly for months to deliver software that they should just give away because fuck capitalism?
- How is it delusional?
  Digital product are duplicable for free, and we artificially limit that in order grant more money to publisher.
  It's like we could duplicate food for free, jesus-like, and we should say "mh no no, I don't care if people is dying from hunger, you can't copy my food without paying".
  And don't start with the "compensating the creator" argument. It's a necessity, of course, but there are thousands of ways to do it better than how we are doing today (where basically all the profit goes to publisher and IP owner).
  There are a lot of other arguments to make about ethics of Piracy, like the fact that IP owner stop taking care and making available valuable cultural artifacts as soon as they are not profitable anymore (lots of thing would be lost forever without piracy), and the fact that price are set in western standards so that a game or an ebook is like half the monthly averages salary of some countries. The list go on.
  Piracy is THE ethical way. The collective benefit are huge, and you can easily compensate for the individual loss (e.g. making donation and direct purchase for small creators in order to support them anyway).
  
  OK, so tell me what is the incentive for a large software company to hire hundreds of workers if they release software that will be sold once and copied infinetly?
  Do you realize that the only reason people actually pay for said software is because pirating is illegal? If pirating was legal, nobody would pay, and companies would have no incentives to hire workers.
  My brother in Christ, you really really live in an ideal bubble. That's not how reality works, you know? People need to get paid for their work, otherwise they won't work.
  If they don't work, there's no content for you to pirate. So yeah, pirating needs to remain illegal and it is stealing, which is a crime, otherwise nothing would make sense.
- Yeah, wow, is this sub satire? These ridiculously superficial arguments shouldn’t convince anyone past a teenager who is stoned out of their mind.
  
  It's like communisn had sex with piracy and a bunch of people with messiah complex were born.
  I want my good ol' piracy back, in which we all knew we were criminals downloading shit because we didn't want to pay, I could use that money to buy a burger or something.

127 comments