[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1n87xho/why_i_d...
Copyright infringement is neither piracy nor theft, those are both metaphors used largely for the purpose of emotional manipulation.
That is a misrepresentation of what is happening across computers and networks. Here is a better analogue:
If someone walks up to my car, taps it with a magic wand, mutters some incantations, waits a few minutes as a perfect duplicate slowly materializes, and then drives away in the duplicate... Of what have I been deprived? Maybe privacy, depending on what I had in the car at the time it was duplicated... But that's tangential to the point here.
There's a worthy argument that the above scenario is still a wrong (some kind of tort, maybe). But there is simply no argument that the above scenario is equivalent to theft.
Theft deprives someone of a scarce material resource. Copyright infringement subverts someone's exclusive, government-granted monopoly. Unlike being secure in one's possessions, copyright has never been understood as a natural right. People grok this distinction intuitively, even if they neither fully understand the technology nor possess the words to articulate it well.
> But that doesn't mean it's a victimless crime to just take it.
Please reply to what I wrote, not what you imagine I implied. Nowhere have I suggested copyright infringement is victimless. I have suggested it is more like a tort than a crime, but civil wrongs are wrongs against someone (i.e. a victim).
> When you just take it without paying (thus violating the social contract), you are in a very real sense stealing that person's time.
Please don't twist and abuse language in lieu of a sound argument. Stealing a person's time is already a specific thing: wage theft. It doesn't involve a nebulous social contract; it involves an actual contract between employer and employee for scarce time.
> So while it might not be the case that a digital copy taken does not cause the original to go missing, [copyright infringement] is very much theft in the moral sense. And that is why people get upset about it.
People aren't entitled to whatever returns they fantasize about for a given business model. If technology obsoletes a competitive strategy, we all have to live in that new world. People are understandably upset, and understandably refer to a wrong (theft) that is familiar, sympathetic, and yet factually not the case.
Copyright infringement need not be understood as theft to be understood as wrong. Treating it as theft mischaracterizes the wrong and sets society on a path to criminal enforcement against civil violations, creeping restrictions on general purpose computing, and the growth of the surveillance state.
Since you talk about game developers, just today was "Hollow Knight: Silksong" released, a game with no DRM (which means it will be on every pirate site the minute it releases, something that was known beforehand), and had just a few hours later over half a million concurrent players on Steam, one of the many storefronts where the game is available.
No industry has ever been killed by piracy, not even close, and the cases of musicians, authors, and game developers who have attributed piracy to their success keeps piling up. I really don't get why people who in other aspects of life try to look at the facts of things keep arguing so fervently about something proven to be, at best, a net positive and, at worst, a way for more people to enjoy arts and entertainment that they would never had otherwise.
If you don't get money for your works, you might be unlucky, or you might just not be good enough to make what people want [to pay for]. As a game developer myself, that's certainly my case. I hope to one day make something so many people care about, that they go out of their way to pirate it, because statistically that means I'd sell a lot of copies.
Important Note: Always ensure you're obtaining music through legal channels
And I'm not arguing it's killing the industry. Shoplifting exists today but brick and mortar isn't dead (Well, it is dying but that's because of online shopping). But stores would see a little less profit due to shop lifting. Very similar to piracy.
It is stealing, and using an out dated definition to try and paint it as anything else is a wild take.
I hope you do make it as a developer one day, and create a hit game, and you have some telemetry showing 10000 people playing and check your Sales to see 200 copies sold and you tell me if you think you haven't been robbed.
"Maybe by definition" does not a counter-argument start.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/words/comments/10k610a/calvin_and_h...
I think a combination of UBI, abolishment of copyright and a busking model with 100% of the proceeds going directly to artists would improve things no end. We have the technology to do this and have no need for leeches like Spotify.
I always find it funny how people want to try and inflate one of the lesser crimes "copyright infringement" into one of the most heinous ones. Might as well call it software rape, it's just as accurate.
gotcha.
I'm not even sure what software rape is supposed to mean, but to me that seems to belittle the very real crime of rape.
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Stealing: the action or offence of taking another person's property without permission or legal right and without intending to return it; theft.
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Regardless if there is anything physical missing, you're still obtaining something for which you don't have the ownership rights, therefore another persons property.
And somewhere there's a starving artist that would get $0.25 per purchase that now gets nothing, so you could argue that you're stealing from the artist.
You would argue they are depriving you of a scarce material resource: your knowledge and experience that make you a valuable, esteemed professional. The corporation would argue that nobody is removing your copy of knowledge and experience, and they would not have hired you in the first place anyway.
I would? Are you sure? Please don't put words in my mouth.
Is your hypothetical an invasion of privacy? Yes.
Is it enslavement of the duplicate? Very probably, yes. You don't specify what the corporation will do next, but I don't see how they'll avoid it.
Is it theft of my knowledge and experience? No. I'm not deprived of them, and would still have them after.
Is it copyright infringment? Possibly, but not necessarily of "my" copyright. I remember plenty of copyrighted music and can hum it on a whim. Presumably the duplicate could do so also, so that music has been copied, along with rest of me.
You've made a rather wild jump from the inanimate to the sentient and from deprivation of specific property to deprivation of natural rights. And you've genuinely lost me with what this hypothetical is even supposed to prove.
Again, it's possible for things to not be theft and also still be wrong for other reasons. Theft is a specific wrong. Words have distinct meanings.
The GPL is a hack leveraging copyright law against itself, speciically, it seeks to achieve two things:
(1) The legal freedom that would exist in the absence of copyright law, and
(2) Source disclosure of modifications, on terms that preserve point (1).
Without copyright law, (1) is unnecessary, but people with concerns like those that motivate the FSF would probably look for a different mechanism to encourage source disclosure.
> Why are you so willing to dismiss other creators right to control how their content gets created and think the people who choose to create content and license their software under the GPL should be respected.
First, how is pointing out the fact that copyright infringement is neither, in the literal sense, either piracy or theft, and that those are metaphors used for their emotional impact, dismissing anyone’s right to do anything?
Second, while I respect the FSF’s basic goals with copyleft licensing, I’d much prefer copyrights with a shorter default term (perhaps extendable with a fee, but even then I’d prefer the terms of the extension beyond a short default term made it possible to buy the work into the public domain at a set price that was also the basis for the fee for maintaining the copyright), narrower subject matter coverage, and broader fair use limits, even though that would limit the utility of the GPL as a wedge to encourage source disclosure on Free terms. I don’t think people using the GPL deserve any better treatment under copyright law than people releasing content that isn't under a Free license, I think the current structure of copyright law is an excessive restriction on human liberty that does not serve the public good.
I would. I was steelmanning your argument. Your bad faith is showing.
> You've made a rather wild jump from the inanimate to the sentient [...] deprivation of natural rights
You have made a wild jump from a work of art to a car without any issue. I have never talked about deprivation of natural rights.
> Theft is a specific wrong.
Define theft then, and let's see if it applies to downloading a pirate copy of a music album.
Anyway OP seems like a great person. And if he did like pirating, cool! You are free to live your life how you see fit :)
Copyright infringement is making a copy of something for purposes beyond fair use when the government has declared it the exclusive right of someone else to make such copies. The legal threshold would also include evidence of harm.
The jump from a digital file to a physical car is specifically to demonstrate that these things are not equivalent. Copying a file does not deprive someone of that file. To make the physical world work similarly to the digital, we have to add magic that violates conservation of energy and duplicate a car at effectively zero marginal cost. To make the digital world work similarly to the physical, we would have to end general purpose computing and lock down all computers such that files can only exist in one place and can only be moved, not copied. Both transformations in an attempt to achieve equivalence are obviously absurd. That's the point.
These things (theft and copyright infringement) are both wrongs, but they are strongly distinct wrongs.
The jump from inanimate things (files and cars) to sentient life (human duplicates) in your example is still unclear to me. It looked to me like you were assuming I would think of it as theft if a corporation made a duplicate of me. So I gave several reasons other than theft for me, or anyone, to think of that as wrong. What are you trying to demonstrate, given that I still don't think your example would be theft and have other reasons---those deprivations of rights---to think of it as wrong?
> I was steelmanning your argument.
No, because what you brought up was not my argument.
Steelmanning, when the counterparty is present, involves restating someone's argument until they agree, "yes, that's a fair summary of my argument," and then critiquing that.
You are strawmanning, not steelmanning: inventing a new example that the counterparty did not reference, which is substantively different from the argument actually made, and then critiquing that.