3 members of Team Xecuter have been indicted in the USA on 11 felony charges

[Donut417]

9 hours ago, AluminiumTech said:

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, piracy isn’t stealing.
 

Losing sales to privacy doesn’t exist, people who pirate weren’t going to buy your game anyways.

Thats not necessarily the case. Ive pirated games before and I went out and purchased them. Because I felt the devs deserved the money. People pirate for a lot of reason:

1) Lack of Availability. Due to the dumb nature of how movies and TV shows are distributed across the world, it could be years to never for some content to get to get across the world. In that case, people will have to pirate it. 

2) DRM. DRM has ruined movies and TV shows in some cases. It makes it harder to watch stuff, because if your player doesn't support the DRM in question then you cant watch the content. Ive come across this in the DVD days. 

 

Also: 

 

3) Cost. Some times these greedy studios just charge way to much money for the content. This is the same reason Cable TV is slowly and painfully dying. 

[Bombastinator]

6 minutes ago, valdyrgramr said:

Uploading something to the net doesn't mean it's fair game either.   If you were in landscaping, and I didn't pay you for the job would you be okay with that?   Pirates really aren't in the right regardless of whatever moral bs they claim or excuse they have.   They are not entitled to a copy because of a sob story, and they're not entitled to a free copy for whatever reason they use as an excuse.   Unless you have direct consent of the copyright holder, or follow other legal guidlines, then yes it is theft.

A narrowly technically correct argument the has the problem that it rolls into other problems like copywrite abuses and patent trolling and other things.   Edge cases tend to make for problems with rules.  There doesn’t seem to be an edge issue here though that I can see.

[Kisai]

5 hours ago, ARikozuM said:

Not exactly. Some of us have purchased, legally, all of the requirements for X products and have no longer been able to get them repaired or replaced. Should those purchases simply be thrown to the wayside? No, absolutely not. If I have a genuine console or game and it no longer works I should be able to get a repair. If it's made no longer usable is it my fault? No. If Nintendo will no longer hold repair services, then that responsibility should flip to the general public with no repercussions. You can't call out "lost profits" on games that you no longer support, create, or package in their original formats. 

I'm not fond of piracy apologist arguments. If you steal, just admit it, and don't dance around it. Don't justify it with "company went out of business", "company doesn't have a localized version", "company discontinued the the software/hardware"

 

Here's 7 examples of piracy, that people seem to be fond of being apologists for:

1. Hackintosh - You're stealing MacOS X. Period.

2. Console emulators - You're stealing games. Period. I'm sure if you audited anyone, be it twitch and youtube streamers to console collectors, chances are everyone has a few emulators, but no copier devices that could actually copy the game to produce a legal backup. Pretty much all pirates got the games off the internet. After that Nintendo leak, every NES and SNES game now has a verifiable image to compare. Likewise GBA and later devices have firmware that can't be distributed with the emulator, and even to ensure complete compatibly with SNES games, you need the firmware blobs from the expansion chips.

3. Old computer emulators - You clearly aren't playing the game on the original media, let alone the original hardware. However in many cases the versions that GOG uses are cracked pirate versions of their own games. These big game companies didn't start archiving their own software until the late-90's, which is also why you haven't seen these same companies do "HD remasters", they can't, they would have to decompile their own games, and they may as well just build a new game than do a remake. Notice GOG doesn't carry the Atari, Amiga or Apple II versions of anything? Because you need BIOS from those devices, and nobody has bothered to make a clean BIOS to boot emulators legally.

4. Manga/Manhua/Comic piracy. There are entire sites still operating that steal comics, translate them, or steal the licensed localized version and post them. People like to excuse their indulgence in it by saying "oh they didn't license it, so it's free to make a fan translation of it" when the reality is, the author and artists can't afford to. It's especially galling when you see "free" content, or patreon content being stolen and posted on these piracy sites, so now the creator doesn't even get the benefit of their own site. To that end... Facebook has utterly destroyed any possibility of having people visting your site. Facebook profits at your expense.

5.  Anime, Cartoons piracy. Just like comics above, people steal it, even if it's legally, free to watch on the licence's site. People are just spiteful pirates when it comes to anime and cartoons, and this results in companies that are funding these shows to not see them as successes and canning them.

6. Film and TV show piracy. Almost the same as above with the cartoons and comics, except that the non-release into non-english markets is ultimately where the piracy starts, and the floats back into the english market. People justify the piracy due to the geoblocks, but then people use those same arguments to pirate shows just because they don't want to pay for the premium channel.

7. Shoplifting. People just steal things for fun. Enter wearing one pair of pants, leave wearing two. How people justify it? "Big company, makes lots of money", sticking-it-to-the-man nonsense. Then there are criminals just steal things to hawk them on eBay.

 

Like in every instance, people have convinced themselves they are not doing something wrong, when yes, they very well are doing something wrong.

 

I don't care what peoples excuses are. If they don't have the original copy in some shape, then you're trying to justify piracy.

[Bombastinator]

59 minutes ago, Kisai said:

I'm not fond of piracy apologist arguments. If you steal, just admit it, and don't dance around it. Don't justify it with "company went out of business", "company doesn't have a localized version", "company discontinued the the software/hardware"

 

Here's 7 examples of piracy, that people seem to be fond of being apologists for:

1. Hackintosh - You're stealing MacOS X. Period.

2. Console emulators - You're stealing games. Period. I'm sure if you audited anyone, be it twitch and youtube streamers to console collectors, chances are everyone has a few emulators, but no copier devices that could actually copy the game to produce a legal backup. Pretty much all pirates got the games off the internet. After that Nintendo leak, every NES and SNES game now has a verifiable image to compare. Likewise GBA and later devices have firmware that can't be distributed with the emulator, and even to ensure complete compatibly with SNES games, you need the firmware blobs from the expansion chips.

3. Old computer emulators - You clearly aren't playing the game on the original media, let alone the original hardware. However in many cases the versions that GOG uses are cracked pirate versions of their own games. These big game companies didn't start archiving their own software until the late-90's, which is also why you haven't seen these same companies do "HD remasters", they can't, they would have to decompile their own games, and they may as well just build a new game than do a remake. Notice GOG doesn't carry the Atari, Amiga or Apple II versions of anything? Because you need BIOS from those devices, and nobody has bothered to make a clean BIOS to boot emulators legally.

4. Manga/Manhua/Comic piracy. There are entire sites still operating that steal comics, translate them, or steal the licensed localized version and post them. People like to excuse their indulgence in it by saying "oh they didn't license it, so it's free to make a fan translation of it" when the reality is, the author and artists can't afford to. It's especially galling when you see "free" content, or patreon content being stolen and posted on these piracy sites, so now the creator doesn't even get the benefit of their own site. To that end... Facebook has utterly destroyed any possibility of having people visting your site. Facebook profits at your expense.

5.  Anime, Cartoons piracy. Just like comics above, people steal it, even if it's legally, free to watch on the licence's site. People are just spiteful pirates when it comes to anime and cartoons, and this results in companies that are funding these shows to not see them as successes and canning them.

6. Film and TV show piracy. Almost the same as above with the cartoons and comics, except that the non-release into non-english markets is ultimately where the piracy starts, and the floats back into the english market. People justify the piracy due to the geoblocks, but then people use those same arguments to pirate shows just because they don't want to pay for the premium channel.

7. Shoplifting. People just steal things for fun. Enter wearing one pair of pants, leave wearing two. How people justify it? "Big company, makes lots of money", sticking-it-to-the-man nonsense. Then there are criminals just steal things to hawk them on eBay.

 

Like in every instance, people have convinced themselves they are not doing something wrong, when yes, they very well are doing something wrong.

 

I don't care what peoples excuses are. If they don't have the original copy in some shape, then you're trying to justify piracy.

The “can’t afford to” argument is straight up BS. There’s postal copywrite which costs a stamp, and there’s signature copywrite which costs nothing at all.  Draw a c inside a circle somewhere in the artwork with your initials and boom.  Didn’t when they should have I’d take though.  A lot of manga is work product and owned by the magazine though.  If a magazine goes out of business local laws would apply.  In the US often copywrite reverts to the original creator regardless of whether or not it is work product.  Varies by legal system though.  I could see Japan being stupid and evil about that one.

[Kisai]

12 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

The “can’t afford to” argument is straight up BS.

Do realize that the average comic artist, writer, inker, and so forth are contractors and do not own the rights to the things they are working on when working for DC/Marvel/Archie/etc and likewise can not afford to self-publish something without a publisher. The internet has made the cost of publishing low-enough that you can put a comic you write/drew online for free, but if it gets too popular, it starts costing you money instead, which is what happens when you try to host a comic on your own domain.

 

The current trend for self-publishing is to post the advance pages to Patreon and the published pages to their own website or a site managed by a publisher. Still, pirates will steal the advances pages from Patreon just to spite the artist. I've mentioned this thing before on this forum when talking about how CloudFlare protects pirates and ignores DMCA's.

 

 

[Bombastinator]

5 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Do realize that the average comic artist, writer, inker, and so forth are contractors and do not own the rights to the things they are working on when working for DC/Marvel/Archie/etc and likewise can not afford to self-publish something without a publisher. The internet has made the cost of publishing low-enough that you can put a comic you write/drew online for free, but if it gets too popular, it starts costing you money instead, which is what happens when you try to host a comic on your own domain.

 

The current trend for self-publishing is to post the advance pages to Patreon and the published pages to their own website or a site managed by a publisher. Still, pirates will steal the advances pages from Patreon just to spite the artist. I've mentioned this thing before on this forum when talking about how CloudFlare protects pirates and ignores DMCA's.

 

 

I do.

the traditional system of comic book creation.

Spoiler

The thing about comic books is there are generally multiple separate people working on a given comic.  There’s the writer, who does the story, the penciler, who lays out the panels, the inker (what I more or less trained to be originally) who draws the characters, and the colorist who colorized the image.  That’s 4 different specialties for each page and that doesn’t include the cover which could have been done by different people entirely.  In such a situation such a thing would be work product owned by the company.  The artists would have been paid for their work by the company. 

Web comics have numerous systems for monetization.  Generally advertising is involved.  Hosting a comic on ones own domain is pretty rare.  Only the most or least popular web comic artists do it.  The most popular generally do it by effectively running companies that either sell advertising or merch, (so advertising for a company they own) it’s a lot like YouTube companies.  YouTube would be a platform and advertising vendor.   There are a bunch of different web comic platform companies.  I haven’t kept track of which ones do what or still exist in years.  New web comics host on their own platforms effectively as vanity press, hoping to get a big enough following to be able to attract the interest of a web comic platform company (so a bit like a rock band hoping to get signed) Really famous web comic publishers (like, say, Phil Follio) have their own companies much like really big rock bands have their own labels.

[Kisai]

5 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

I do.

the traditional system of comic book creation.

  Reveal hidden contents

The thing about comic books is there are generally multiple separate people working on a given comic.  There’s the writer, who does the story, the penciler, who lays out the panels, the inker (what I more or less trained to be originally) who draws the characters, and the colorist who colorized the image.  That’s 4 different specialties for each page and that doesn’t include the cover which could have been done by different people entirely.  In such a situation such a thing would be work product owned by the company.  The artists would have been paid for their work by the company. 

Web comics have numerous systems for monetization.  Generally advertising is involved.  Hosting a comic on ones own domain is pretty rare.  Only the most or least popular web comic artists do it.  The most popular generally do it by effectively running companies that either sell advertising or merch, (so advertising for a company they own) it’s a lot like YouTube companies.  YouTube would be a platform and advertising vendor.   There are a bunch of different web comic platform companies.  I haven’t kept track of which ones do what or still exist in years.  New web comics host on their own platforms effectively as vanity press, hoping to get a big enough following to be able to attract the interest of a web comic platform company (so a bit like a rock band hoping to get signed) Really famous web comic publishers (like, say, Phil Follio) have their own companies much like really big rock bands have their own labels.

Phil Foglio’s entire family business is the comic, a comic that started four years before going online. For all intents he is an established creator.

 

New creators, be it webcomics, indie games, or twitch streamers don’t automatically become profitable enough to do it full time, and if their real passion is creating, you can’t have someone selling your content and keeping the entire profit like what happens on Facebook, DeviantArt and tumblr. No “free Webhosting” or social media network schemes have ever paid a creator. The worst thing you can do as a creator is rely on Facebook, Google or Twitter.

 

The content creation curve is shaped like a bowl. It either costs a lot of money up front and over time costs less, but get too popular and it starts costing you exponentially more in costs, and people will readily steal the content or mass-produce counterfeit merchandise to undermine your own.

[Intergalacticbits]

I can't comment on the OP because I don't really know anything about it.

 

I do agree with some others on here though that in general I feel piracy is stealing and I hate it when people defend it.

It bums me because it just fuels and justifies the annoying control that content creators use sometimes.

Like for example how everything is moving to streaming only.

I really hate that in movies and music and I'm sure I will hate it when it finally is how all gaming is done too.

 

I don't make a lot of money but I buy my stuff legally like I think the majority of people do.

I like to store my stuff on my own hardware legally and I like to feel a sense of ownership of what I buy.

So why should I be deprived of that pleasure I pay for because a small percentage of the USA population like to steal content?

I feel like when people pirate stuff or defend it they just help big business in these industries to poop on me the honest consumer.

[divito]

Ultimately, piracy is a market correction. Whether that be related to accessibility, price, etc..., people often lose sight of that and parrot the corporation's messages and hold a naively unyielding position. 

Sure, there are those that hack and offer the content with nefarious purposes, and there are those consumers that simply exploit that availability, but it is a not a black and white proposition and never has been. For all the people that "steal" the game, there are many that have to resort to downloads for usage purposes, lack of support and a host of other issues that are the result of greed, negligence, or corporate apathy.

[Bombastinator]

3 minutes ago, divito said:

Ultimately, piracy is a market correction. Whether that be related to accessibility, price, etc..., people often lose sight of that and parrot the corporation's messages and hold a naively unyielding position. 

Sure, there are those that hack and offer the content with nefarious purposes, and there are those consumers that simply exploit that availability, but it is a not a black and white proposition and never has been. For all the people that "steal" the game, there are many that have to resort to downloads for usage purposes, lack of support and a host of other issues that are the result of greed, negligence, or corporate apathy.

If this were true, book piracy would have been much more common.   Information storage is not a new thing.  There have been several massive technological changes that have altered its use.  Before the 14th century books had to be hand copied which took man years of labor.  They cost thousands each.  Then movable type came along which changed it from man years to man weeks.  Then there was paper and printing changes such as web presses that cut it from weeks to day, from days to hours, and from hours to minutes.  Content has always had about the same costs though.   Now storage is seconds which makes content cost the major one.  Piracy is all about printing and ignores content.  The piracy claim that content has no value is false.  If content has no value no one will make content.

[divito]

20 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

If this were true, book piracy would have been much more common.   

I'm not sure I understand; there are many academic references to piracy and the large scale at which it was done. It's also been documented that they were primarily filling the void left by supply issues and price issues and would satisfy as much demand as they could. There are also geographic and political reasons that led to the proliferation of piracy involving books.
 

27 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

Piracy is all about printing and ignores content.  The piracy claim that content has no value is false.  If content has no value no one will make content.

All things that are subject to piracy have a value. That's not a piracy claim; if anything, it's that the content has the wrong value, or doesn't serve a language or location. Thus market forces establish distribution at an alternate value, to alternate consumers.

[divito]

10 minutes ago, valdyrgramr said:

So, if I find that you're greedy I can rob you?

You can rob me for whatever reasons you deem appropriate. 

[divito]

6 minutes ago, valdyrgramr said:

Then it's not robbery because you consented to it.  Piracy is piracy unless you have consent from the copyright holder.  It's not a market correction in anyway, and it's basically no different than robbing the copyright holder.

I didn't consent to the theft. But you as a free individual can act however you want, with whatever will and reasons you hold. This is why a full spectrum of behavior exists in the world. 

The fact that copyright law, publishing rights, etc... vary ridiculously throughout the world also showcases that the inane position of "piracy is bad" doesn't really capture all the facets that have created it in the first place, as a market correction. Sure, some aspects of current piracy in relation to digital media, distribution, and counterfeits are not the same as they used to be, the fundamentals that established them are still quite prevalent. 

[Derangel]

On 10/4/2020 at 3:23 AM, Master Disaster said:

I only hope Nintendo don't go after the open source CFW next.

Nintendo generally doesn't seem to mind the open source projects existing. I imagine they keep tabs on them and use their findings in order to patch security holes in their systems. As long it's kept open source, free, and as long as the community at large remains anti-piracy their existence seems to be tolerated.

[Donut417]

1 minute ago, valdyrgramr said:

have argued that laws need updating which is a better legal tactic for the interest of consumers.

The question is how should the laws be updated? Id argue that patents and copy rights should only have a certain time period. None of this 100 years bull shit either. But companies are not going to allow this to happen. Plus it would be difficult to put any system in place in the internet age. Any system they do have will have crappy DRM. 

[Donut417]

8 minutes ago, valdyrgramr said:

For one, remove the 75 year thing for certain scenarios at least.   With physical media allow/entitle a digital copy since physical media doesn't exactly last.   Maybe do piracy trolling instead of punishing the actual customer with DRM.   Piracy trolling like with that Batman game and the one Serious Sam.

Id say stop charging ridiculous fees to services like Netflix. Netflix was working on reducing piracy. But then those greedy bastards were like......... we can force Netflix to pay us more money. By fracturing the internet in to eleventy bullion streaming services, they have forced people back to piracy. 

 

They will never give up on DRM. Why? Because piracy is too hard to prosecute in the criminal courts. Even corporations have limits to how many times they want to sue people in the civil courts. Doing lawsuits is like playing wack a mole, its never ending. 

 

[Donut417]

5 minutes ago, valdyrgramr said:

Not justifying their reason, but that's kinda why they resort to it.

And being a greedy mother fer is why people Pirate. If they dont make the content easy to get and affordable people will steal it. So I guess the studio's will have to learn to take less because not sure about you, but I aint going to any theater any time soon and theaters may not survive at the rate we are going. Im not going to pay extra to watch a movie. So they either will have to take less, or piracy will increase. 

8 minutes ago, valdyrgramr said:

ronically, some devs are doing away with DRM because they found the flaw in it.   One example would be id due to Tiago hating Denuvo with a passion.   He removed it from Doom Eternal due to the problems with it.

Thats one dev. There are still plenty who use DRM. Also services like Steam have DRM built in. 

[S w a t s o n]

How did I not hear od SXOS before this? Did it work on newer consoles? I was looking into soft modding mine but it was too new and this never came up in my research. Not that I would have PAID for it lmfao.

 

 

Edit: Looks like they had plans to make a jjg for it, or maybe had a hard mod that could be soldered for v2 switches, interesting

[Kisai]

33 minutes ago, valdyrgramr said:

For one, remove the 75 year thing for certain scenarios at least.   With physical media allow/entitle a digital copy since physical media doesn't exactly last.   Maybe do piracy trolling instead of punishing the actual customer with DRM.   Piracy trolling like with that Batman game and the one Serious Sam.

You have to admit, that at least with games/software, you can sneak "Brokenness" into your products that only surface in pirate versions, and thus pirates readily reveal themselves to the company when they ask for support.

 

I can recall, at least as far back as Diablo I, when it's copy-protection worked on Win98 but not Win 95 retail, So people who pirated it and then upgraded to Win98 suddenly found their CD copies didn't work. It was also rather interesting how once that was revealed, that all the posts saying it's a windows problem disappeared. Another example that comes to mind is how many Win9x DRM solutions required VXD's and if you upgraded to Win2K/XP or tried to install the game to Win Vista/7/8/10 the installer wouldn't even work. Strip the DRM out using some readily found patches (which have been easy to find and said site has been around for more than 20 years) and now the game works. Yet under the DMCA this is illegal.

 

Which kinda goes back to the moral/amoral aspect of format shifting and compatiblity. If I wanted to say, watch my VHS copy of "The Lion King", welp, that isn't happening, I do not have a VCR, and even if I could get a VCR, I would need one that had HDMI, which do not exist, because VHS decks haven't been produced for a few years. Or I could buy the Blueray version, which is cheaper than going through the hassle of trying to get the equipment to play the VHS version. This is what Disney wants you to do, is buy the film again every time. I'm willing to buy it again, ONCE. Just like the NES and SNES games, I'm willing to buy them again once, and only if the second time is an easily format-shifted digital format. I'm not going to buy the same film I had on VHS, on DVD, HD BD, UHDBD, and 8K BD, no that's just getting silly. Once you have it on DVD or BD, you should have a digital copy that you can still play on the 4K and 8K TV's, and unless there is suddenly a 8K UHD DCI color version that requires a very expensive TV to watch on, I could not find myself justifying paying just for a 4K version (FYI, every film I've bought on disc from Disney has been the 4K+BD+Digital version, I watch the digital version since making 4K BD's work on Windows is a pain. The physical version is to watch at my Mom's place.)

 

[divito]

1 hour ago, valdyrgramr said:

You did by the phrasing.   But, I'd still be punished and/or fined for theft if you pressed charges.   It's the same with piracy.   Moral or whatever excuse people use for crimes doesn't put them in the right.   As much as people love the whole vigilante, Johnny Lee Miller, and Robinhood bs it's not really a good argument for real life.   You're basically, at that point, no different than a lawyer arguing for their client who clearly broke the law.  Just because you don't agree with the law doesn't give you the right to violate it either.   There are other ways, legal, that you can go through.  The problem is these people resort to criminal acts instead. 

My phrasing was in relation to you having the ability and right to do whatever you are physically and mentally capable of doing. I think you're conflating "rights" with "allowed" or "permitted." You having the rights, as well as the physical ability and will to rob me, does not mean that I endorse, approve or condone myself getting robbed.

Yes, people can be punished by the law due to piracy. That doesn't make it immoral (doesn't exist), just illegal where they happen to live. And not agreeing with a law has nothing really to do with anything; there are silly laws all over the world that are still enforced. All persons have the right to violate a law, but they have to be prepared for the consequences if such a law is enforced. Piracy is no different.

And again, they came as a result of market conditions. There are statistics that show that since music services have became common and filled many niches in terms of content and price, piracy of music is actually in the decline.

On the flip side, TV shows remain a top pirated item because as people cut the cords on their ridiculously-sized cable bills, the content fragmentation means that rather than subscribe, it's far easier to download. Rather than establish partnerships, or let a company handle the rights to reach their audiences and be pro-consumer, everyone wants their piece of the pie. This leads the consumer to avoid paying for 6 streaming services to get each of the shows they want and avoid the higher price tag. Producers and creators can bemoan the piracy all they want, but it comes for a reason.
 

[divito]

12 minutes ago, valdyrgramr said:

Me robbing you, for whatever reason is immoral as is piracy.  It's illegal because you're stealing, and a sob story is not an excuse.  Theft is wrong regardless of your reasoning for it.  Ease of use is not an excuse for theft.  In the end, they're nothing more than excuses for people to feel just when they're not.

A sob story is an excuse, just as lack of funds is an excuse, or lack of access is an excuse. You don't agree with those justifications, but that doesn't negate them.

What you have is your subjective opinion masquerading as some physical law of the universe. Right and wrong are societal constructs; they don't actually exist, nor are they constant or objective. Laws, perspectives and "morality" have changed throughout civilization. 

We can absolutely agree that piracy is illegal in most parts of the world, but as history has shown through countless papers and studies, they came about as the result of a market correction. Books were published and sold in certain geographic regions and in certain languages; "pirates" printed copies to sell outside those regions and translated them. Eventually, publishers actually paid the alternate publishers (re: "pirates") and let them help expand their supply. They were initially vilified until they realized why and then included those evil pirates.

Music was sold as a package of songs on an album where people only really listened to a small amount. The advent of ripping personal CDs, and the P2P development led to a more consumer-friendly and accessible medium for music enthusiasts. It's been well documented that the world would be a lot different if the industry supported P2P or single songs before litigating themselves into a forever enemy of consumers.

Video games used to have demo discs for console and for PC. Those started to disappear, DRM arrived, and region locks became ever more prevalent, leading to piracy. Most people dismiss the idea of people "trying out" games, but without demos still being part of the fabric of gaming, we can't truly know if those would lead to sales or not.

There are examples ad nauseam, and while you don't agree or support any of the justifications for the history of occurrences for media piracy, the facts are plain.

 

[divito]

2 minutes ago, valdyrgramr said:

No, it doesn't. 

By definition, they are excuses. Just because you say no doesn't mean anything.

3 minutes ago, valdyrgramr said:

I've lived the poor and disabled life, so you're barking up the wrong tree. 

Relevance?

3 minutes ago, valdyrgramr said:

You don't need media luxuries to survive, so stealing them just adds to the immortality. 

I never claimed someone needed media luxuries to survive. 

4 minutes ago, valdyrgramr said:

You're doing it out if desire not an actual necessity. 

People who pirate media have a lot of varying motivations, and sure, none are actual necessities. 

5 minutes ago, valdyrgramr said:

I don't agree with it for various reasons due to being in their shoes and realizing that it is indeed immoral.  Besides, you're putting yourself at financial risk even more by breaking the law, so it's dumb to do to begin with.

Outside of the "immoral" part, I agree. They're putting themselves at risk depending on where they live by participating in piracy.

6 minutes ago, valdyrgramr said:

Demos still exist, so I dont what you're talking about.

They are not as common or plentiful as they used to be, which limits consumer ability to judge and make an informed choice.

7 minutes ago, valdyrgramr said:

There's no facts in your argument.  You're simply making excuses for criminals.

I'm not making the excuses, I'm just acknowledging the reasons and the conditions that lead to them.

[Bombastinator]

1 hour ago, divito said:

My phrasing was in relation to you having the ability and right to do whatever you are physically and mentally capable of doing. I think you're conflating "rights" with "allowed" or "permitted." You having the rights, as well as the physical ability and will to rob me, does not mean that I endorse, approve or condone myself getting robbed.

Yes, people can be punished by the law due to piracy. That doesn't make it immoral (doesn't exist), just illegal where they happen to live. And not agreeing with a law has nothing really to do with anything; there are silly laws all over the world that are still enforced. All persons have the right to violate a law, but they have to be prepared for the consequences if such a law is enforced. Piracy is no different.

And again, they came as a result of market conditions. There are statistics that show that since music services have became common and filled many niches in terms of content and price, piracy of music is actually in the decline.

On the flip side, TV shows remain a top pirated item because as people cut the cords on their ridiculously-sized cable bills, the content fragmentation means that rather than subscribe, it's far easier to download. Rather than establish partnerships, or let a company handle the rights to reach their audiences and be pro-consumer, everyone wants their piece of the pie. This leads the consumer to avoid paying for 6 streaming services to get each of the shows they want and avoid the higher price tag. Producers and creators can bemoan the piracy all they want, but it comes for a reason.
 

Ah.  The whole “beyond good and evil” thing.  There an old saying “people who claim evil does not exist are generally fixing to do it”

 

I don’t believe in the non existence of good and evil, though I do believe that it’s often very close to impossible for humans to know the difference.  Doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist though,  just that humans aren’t very bright in the grand scheme of things.  The whole piracy as smuggling argument is interesting.   It fails because people will use smuggled goods whether they can afford to pay fees or not.  Easy data transfer has upended a bunch of media systems.  It’s something society is still working out.

[Bombastinator]

1 minute ago, valdyrgramr said:

Actually, it does.  Theft is an immoral act, and regardless of the scenario it is immoral.

 

Being in their shoes is relevant.  As even in that scenario I knew their excuse for piracy was bs and still is.  They don't need it to survive, and there's no justification other than "I'm bored, so I'm going to rob someone.  Therefore, feel sorry for me as it's okay!"

 

I do love that you think robbing someone is not immoral.  Because that's what it is rather you like it or not, and you're making excuses to justify a criminal act by sating it's not wrong.  Well fine, I don't think homicide is wrong.  I think it's perfectly fine to murder someone, and since I'm mentally disabled do not argue with me because I just don't like people as someone with Asperger's.  Remember, it's not immoral!

 

A lack of demo discs is not a good excuse either.  Theft is theft, and this excuse is rather old.

 

Theft is almost always immoral.  There are occasional exceptions.  The problem imho is that patent law has been badly abused and been lengthened well beyond it’s appropriate duration for a lot of things.  Copywrite law covers more than it should as well.  So we get patent trolls and a bunch of other things that hurt society.   They need to be reworked.  I don’t give a shit what Disney thinks.  It’s causing a lot of problems.  Maybe we need a new type of thing specifically for the problems Disney was having.  Turning patent and copywrite holders into what amounts to landed gentry though has all the problems caused by landed gentry though.

[divito]

25 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

Ah.  The whole “beyond good and evil” thing.  There an old saying “people who claim evil does not exist are generally fixing to do it”

 

I don’t believe in the non existence of good and evil, though I do believe that it’s often very close to impossible for humans to know the difference.  Doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist though,  just that humans aren’t very bright in the grand scheme of things.  

There is a book I have called Moral Minds that attempts to suggest that morality is universal as a result of nature.