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[Akura]

I should state that in many places there are ALREADY laws against letting people borrow your car or even use it.

I should also note that I heard somewhere, possibly this forum, that some people wanted laws against more than one person watching the same TV at any given time.

[Aequor]

No, I understand the aim of the law. I am arguing that piracy is not good. The reform is irrelevant to that. The aims of those that created it are irrelevant to that. I've said that this law is ridiculous earlier in the thread, because it is. It's nothing more than greed camouflaged with a story about morality, but that principle that's being hijacked here isn't suddenly invalid because of that.

No, even that is not right. Piracy is what gave me knowledge of all band I listen to. Epica? Heard of on a forum. Black bomb A? Ditto. Rammstein? My sister gave me the copy of a CD. Tristania? wouldn't know without radio-blog.
Songs worth nothing, but merchandising, concert and support to these band still does. All they have to do is adapt and sell those. I even buy Cd, for the pleasure to have the album.
And if you want to know about them? You'll go to youtube. There is nothing amoral at getting something that is free. Making money out of it is their job. And there is a ton of ways.

Out of interest, do you apply the same logic to video games? To films?

[_DivideByZero_]

Piracy, in my opinion is immoral. It somewhat depends however.
If I were to say, download a game and then try it out, and I didn't like it, then I wouldn't buy it. Since I would never pay for the game in the first place, what's wrong with downloading it to see if I would waste my money or not?
If I were to instead download a game, play it all the time, yet not buy it though, that'd be immoral. The developer deserves the money for developing the game.

Films, on the other hand, are mostly a one-time-deal. Even if you get it on DVD, you'll watch it a few times at best, so in that case piracy would be wrong.

[Starver]

If I were to say, download a game and then try it out, and I didn't like it, then I wouldn't buy it. Since I would never pay for the game in the first place, what's wrong with downloading it to see if I would waste my money or not?
If I were to instead download a game, play it all the time, yet not buy it though, that'd be immoral. The developer deserves the money for developing the game.

Rhetorical question, of no intended agenda, to which I know there'll be no universally accepted answer anyway, so probably best not to even try answering:
If (generic)you couldn't freely obtain a given game, so had to buy it, to try it, to not like it, the developer would end up getting money for a game they developed but which you paid for...  is the willingness to pay for such a game a moral issue on your behalf[1] and is the initial selling of the game moral or immoral on their behalf?  And does it matter whether you are in a majority or minority (of people who end up not liking it)?


Sorry, just a thought.  Badly represented in mere text.

[1] Compare and contrast with leaving all games of unknown likeability on the shop shelf, just in case and everyone else doing likewise...

[_DivideByZero_]

There's nobody obliging you to buy a game without knowing about it. You could watch youtube videos of gameplay, or read reviews. Nowadays we have so many ways to judge a game online that you generally know what you're getting.

So to answer your question, selling the game even if some of the customers don't like it is completely moral because those to buy the game choose to on their own. I don't see how choosing to pick a game up off the shelf is necessarily a moral issue.

[Starver]

Point missed, it appears, although I'll take some of the blame for perhaps not making the point well in the first place.

[Bohandas]

Poorly thought out things with good intentions do not equal death needing.

Correct. According to common wisdom it actually warrants eternal damnation, and in this case I'm forced to agree (cf. the axiom "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions").

[Bohandas]

By the way. I would also like to make the point that intellectual property violation should not be equated with theft, even if you do feel that it is immoral. From a moral standpoint, intellectual property violation is at most equivalent to using somebody else's property without their permission, whereas theft implies actually taking that property away (and regardless of whether you use it or not).

To use a metaphor, consider the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, although Goldilocks has used muck of the bears' property without their consent, she has ot in any way stolen any of it (except for the porridge). Digital content is like the bears' chairs and beds.

[Criptfeind]

You are pretty much missing the point there. That would only be valid if the artists and companies were making this stuff only for themselves and hoarding it away from others. Here's the big thing: They are trying to sell it.

When you steal it, the issue is not in fact the stealing of the music/game/book/ect you are stealing the profits they would have made if you had purchased it.

That money, which because of your illegal actions you have and they do not is indeed 'property'

[Bohandas]

You are pretty much missing the point there. That would only be valid if the artists and companies were making this stuff only for themselves and hoarding it away from others. Here's the big thing: They are trying to sell it.

When you steal it, the issue is not in fact the stealing of the music/game/book/ect you are stealing the profits they would have made if you had purchased it.

That money, which because of your illegal actions you have and they do not is indeed 'property'

My argument never stated that it was not immoral nor did it state that it did not have the potential to cause financial loss to the copyright holders. My argument was simply that not all unauthorized and/or potentially harmful misuse of others' property is equivalent to theft.

To go back to my Goldilocks metaphor, see if you can find what is wrong with the following passage:

...Then Baby Bear looked into the living room and saw the shattered remains of his chair. "Somebody's been sitting in MY chair, and they've shattered it all to pieces!" cried Baby Bear, "Also its been stolen!"

[G-Flex]

My argument was simply that not all unauthorized and/or potentially harmful misuse of others' property is equivalent to theft.

Hardly any of it ever is, which is why they're not considered the same crime (terrible scare-tactic PSAs and "WOULD YOU STEAL A CAR??" aside).

When you steal it, the issue is not in fact the stealing of the music/game/book/ect you are stealing the profits they would have made if you had purchased it.

There is never any guarantee that someone who pirates something would have bought it. There is also no guarantee that they won't legitimately buy it at some future date.

Let's face it, most of us have pirated something we would never have bought ourselves, and probably very many of us have bought music or a movie after illicitly experiencing them somehow. Personally, I can think of many things I've pirated but would never in my life buy, pirated then bought, or hell, even bought and later pirated, in rare cases... in addition to things I bought without ever pirating them to begin with.

Simply put, you cannot assume that someone who has downloaded a movie, game, album, or anything else, would have actually bought it legitimately, nor can you assume they never will, nor can you assume the price at which they would.

I mean, let's say I download an album: How much financial loss does the company incur due to that? It is completely impossible to say. It's possible that I'll eventually buy it for three dollars from a reseller, or ten dollars on sale, twenty dollars at a retail store, or all the tracks individually for some other price on iTunes. It's also possible that I'll never buy it. It's also possible that I will buy it, but never would have bought it if I hadn't pirated it and listened to it first. There are indeed many cases where pirating something has resulted in people, myself included, giving more money to the distributor, because of the ability to pirate something and check it out first to determine if we like it.


I'm not arguing in favor of piracy from some ethical standpoint, but you simply cannot conflate copyright infringement and "theft", and there is absolutely no way to determine how much loss, if any, a distributor will incur due to someone pirating their product.

[Criptfeind]

My argument was simply that not all unauthorized and/or potentially harmful misuse of others' property is equivalent to theft.

And mine was that it totally is.

So, forgetting your dumb metaphor, lets move on with mine!

"Oh no said the X! Because of Y stealing from me I do not have Z!"

@ G-Flex: So we can not calculate the amount of thief, but that still makes it thief. And I know sometimes piracy would help a product, but until proven otherwise I will listen to occam's razor and say it is over all a bad thing.

[ein]

Here, let me illustrate things for you:

Theft:
('_')o     ('_')
('_')     o('_')

Piracy:
('_')o     ('_')
('_')o    o('_')

[Criptfeind]

Here, let me illustrate things for you:

Theft:
('_')$     ('_')
('_')     $('_')

Piracy:
('_')$     ('_')
('_')     $('_')

[G-Flex]

@ G-Flex: So we can not calculate the amount of thief, but that still makes it thief.

I would ramble a lot, but you seem the type who probably does better with visuals, so I'm just going to refer back to ein's last post here.

And I know sometimes piracy would help a product, but until proven otherwise I will listen to occam's razor and say it is over all a bad thing.

I never said it's not a bad thing. I made that explicitly clear. All I stated was that it's not theft, and that you cannot say with any certainty that someone infringing upon copyright is causing financial harm, much less the degree of it.

Here, let me illustrate things for you:

Theft:
('_')$     ('_')
('_')     $('_')

Piracy:
('_')$     ('_')
('_')     $('_')

You cannot be serious. You are not taking money from anyone when you pirate something. Pirating something may cause you to not give them money, or to give them less, but that is not the same as theft and you cannot determine that this is even the case in any particular scenario.

Yes, companies likely lose money overall to piracy. No, this amount is not equal to the combined market value of all pirated copies, nor is the market value constant.