I miss the days of VHS and DVD shelfs in homes, for example. If you bought the tapes and had them in your home, no corporate entity could alter those tapes without your consent, monitor how many times you watch them, sell your data to whomever they please without your knowledge, roll out new mandatory conditions to a ‘user agreement,’ or remove them from your library if/when they like.
I noticed some dumb change in how Dictionary definitions are shown in the Spotlight (ie, overall search my computer function) in MacOS this week. I’ve turned off all auto-updates, and I didn’t make that change or consent to it. But despite paying the full price all by myself for this machine, I clearly don’t have 100% control over it. It seems very clearly to me that consumers having control and privacy over their Internet-connected devices is a bygone era.
After Blizzard, the video game company, replaced copies of Warcraft 3 that I and others had paid for in full and installed on our computers that we could play without connecting to the Internet with a lower-quality copy that prohibited offline play - I swore I’d never pay for a video game again*, and 3 years later I haven’t backslid on that. I felt so angry, cheated, and robbed by that. (*Edit: my criticism and frustration is really more with larger developers/companies/creators - I appreciate and am happy to support smaller, more independent and libre ones.)
Many people probably won’t be bothered by these things, but I am. I don’t want to pay full price for something that I don’t truly own. I miss the familiarity. I miss the reliability. I miss feeling like it’s mine. Dependable. Trustworthy.
Picking my old guitar up again has never looked so appealing. I think I want to go back to investing more time, money, and energy into things that aren’t connected to the internet
Please, explain to me why piracy is in any way morally or ethically wrong?
If you really need me to explain it, there’s no hope for you. Even a child understands why stealing is bad.
Oh, sorry, I meant software or media piracy, not, like, actual piracy.
If you pirate from a company worth billions, it’s stealing and you should be ashamed of yourself you greedy thief degenerate leech.
If a company steals from you, well… uh, I guess you deserved it. Why are you so entitled, that thing you bought you should be grateful for what little time you had with it. Even though you paid for it, it’s not yours it’s theirs. What’s wrong with you?
LOL why do you people fabricate these stories and then act like they have absolutely anything to do with what I’ve said?
Oh right, because you don’t have any legitimate arguments.
What would a child say if they were asked whether they would steal a loaf of bread to feed their starving family if they had no other way of saving them? What would you say? Does context matter in moral judgements?
LOL WTF dude? You are not stealing food, you’re stealing entertainment.
I actually think the ethics of media piracy are even less debatable than those of stealing food. If you’re stealing food, you are depriving someone of it. If you copy a song or a movie or a game, literally no one loses anything.
To be clear, I absolutely support people stealing food to survive, especially from stores and double especially from large corporations.
You’re depriving the creator of that content from compensation for their work. You know this, you just don’t care.
… no, you literally are not. For that to be the case, you would have to already be planning to purchase the good, and then decide to pirate it instead. Even if that is the case (which in the vast majority of cases it is not), it still requires absurd mental gymnastics to reframe not paying someone money as stealing money from that person. You haven’t signed a contract. The entire concept of a “lost sale” is a lie. If someone pirating a movie is a lost sale, so is someone deciding not to see that movie because the ticket is too expensive, or the reviews are too bad. This is why I said it’s internalized corporate propaganda, because it places the onus for fairly compensating artists on the audience instead of the industry.
Additionally, the economics of almost every media distribution solution in existence means that purchasing a piece of media puts only a miniscule fraction of that price into the hands of the artist. Which is why I mentioned direct donation: giving a music artist you like $10 directly is a better way to support them than paying for Spotify Premium or even buying their discography on CD.
The mental gymnastics you people go through to justify theft is honestly just astonishing, that you’re able to delude yourself in this way. It’s fascinating from a psychological perspective.
I agree. No one said that though. You’re not stealing money, you’re stealing intellectual property. Something someone, or more likely multiple or hundreds of someones dedicated time and money to create, with the expectation of compensation from it’s consumer.
It places it on the consumer. You know, the person who benefits from the project’s creation?
LOL oh please, go on, where are you submitting your “donations” to? Does Brad Pitt have a Patreon page now?
It must be so nice to live in a fictional utopia where everyone is fairly compensated and no one tries to take from others, which is, ironically, exactly what you’re doing.
Oh, you believe in intellectual property. I don’t, and I find the concept an affront to human creativity.
Brad Pitt doesn’t need donations. Anyone who does generally has avenues – very often Patreons, yes.