Is Online Piracy ever Justified? A Yemenis Perspective

[wanderingfool2]

2 hours ago, Stahlmann said:

My view on piracy is pretty simple: If you're gonna steal something, at least do it with a smile. Be honest to yourself and accept that you do it because you don't want to pay. Don't try to justify it and argue how you have the moral authority to steal stomething. There is no moral authority that justifies stealing.

Well in some outlier cases there are.

 

There are shows, since I'm in Canada, that I cannot legally access without pirating them (Like some British shows).  It's not that I wouldn't support them, it's just that I can't support them.  I usually end up buying their box-sets (but even then it's limited runs and often DVD's so I get lesser quality and also delayed).

 

While I do admit that most people pirate because they can, and that it's out of not wanting to pay (I admit I do that as well, and at that you can only justify it to yourself).  Just the statement there is no moral authority that justifies stealing isn't correct.

 

Moral authority is mutually exclusive from justifying stealing.

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

Many people in the west, still pirate television and films, usually of foreign countries, because that is the only way those media get seen. There is no "Steam for Film and Television". The closest to that is iTunes, and iTunes does not carry foreign shows. Only that which has been picked up by a local distributor, and it's often censored or localized differently.

This

[Alex Atkin UK]

3 hours ago, Stahlmann said:

People pirating games and buying them after finding out they like the game are similar to people who say they disable adblock for specific YouTube creators. They might exist in some extremely rare cases, but most of the time they're just talking shit because they want to justify themself.

Wouldn't be the first time I'm a "really rare case".

[CKatt]

For a look from a different angle check out this article. Power through Piracy - Censorship and Government Regulation of Music

It outlines how pirated music in North Korea fights government control. May not seem relevant in your country but per @PowerNet's initial question you might say it is justified.

 

I especially like the comparison of North vs South music videos "Let's support our Supreme Commander with Arms" is a real banger

[Rex Hite]

4 hours ago, Bitter said:

Ah yes, poor people don't deserve to enjoy themselves.

My experience living and working in poverty stricken and marginal places in Angola and Afghanistan for a few decades was that we had plenty of time to amuse ourselves and there was no need to access licensed or corporate owned sources of entertainment. A chess board, a backgammon set, some dice and a deck of cards, and books and magazines for quiet time was more than enough.  I don't think licensed mass entertainment is some gold standard of recreation that should be aspired to, much less entitled to. But if that's what's needed to get through the day, then go for it.

 

 

 

 

[Bitter]

11 minutes ago, Rex Hite said:

My experience living and working in poverty stricken and marginal places in Angola and Afghanistan for a few decades was that we had plenty of time to amuse ourselves and there was no need to access licensed or corporate owned sources of entertainment. A chess board, a backgammon set, some dice and a deck of cards, and books and magazines for quiet time was more than enough.  I don't think licensed mass entertainment is some gold standard of recreation that should be aspired to, much less entitled to. But if that's what's needed to get through the day, then go for it.

Exactly. If that's your relaxation then you should be allowed to partake. Maybe simple board games aren't your thing but Friends really tickles your funny bone. Just because you're poor doesn't mean you don't deserve to enjoy things. Everyone deserves to be happy.

[Rex Hite]

46 minutes ago, Bitter said:

Exactly. If that's your relaxation then you should be allowed to partake. Maybe simple board games aren't your thing but Friends really tickles your funny bone. Just because you're poor doesn't mean you don't deserve to enjoy things. Everyone deserves to be happy.

As long as the happiness is benign and doesn't harm others.

I'll agree with America's founding fathers on this one; happiness may be freely pursued but happiness itself not an entitlement. This is important because if people are defining their own happiness then that means others will be forced to define its limits. And that includes the owners of mass corporately controlled entertainment. But as far as I am concerned the so-called 'piracy' issue around distribution is at most a civil matter but mostly a matter of conscience and circumstance. I don't believe content creators and distributors are owed more than their investment in protecting the content and not in their costs to create it; because I don't think criminal law should be used to protect their risk.

 

 

[Arika]

I recently downloaded a cracked version of software that i had paid a lifetime license for so i have it as a backup for if they ever take down their activation servers or if i ever need to be without internet for an extended period of time (because despite it being something that should work fine without internet, it needs to re-auth twice a month...)

 

So yes, i see that as justified, i paid for a life time license, i dont' give a shit what their ToS or EULA say about needing to phone home to their servers to confirm i have a license...

[LogicalDrm]

In the 90s and even 00s, I could see it more justified with the "bad internet" reason. Poverty maybe, but then again, 90s and 00s game prices weren't that high, and most companies were using regional pricing instead of just having same number regardless of currency. But today, "bad internet" is lousy excuse since most of the piracy is done with torrents anyway. And payments go through internet constantly.

 

Poverty or bad economy is the harder. But if you can afford the hardware, you can afford the games. So any argument like "so poor can't have enjoyment" falls down with that.

 

Imo crime is always wrong. Regardless of why you are committing it. And against whom. 

[ewitte]

On 11/2/2023 at 8:20 AM, Stahlmann said:

There is no moral authority that justifies stealing.

I've tried to see the logic in calling it "stealing" but it is not.  stealing - "the action or offense of taking another person's property without permission or legal right and without intending to return it; theft:".  A copy is not the same thing, it never leaves the hands of the original party.  Personally, I don't download apps/games from unknown sources.  Who knows what was done to it.  For those types of items generally I just wait for sales or bundles with hardware.

[Bitter]

Maybe theft of sale is a more appropriate term.

 

Piracy of academic materials is always OK in my opinion. $250 for a text book is theft.

[Rex Hite]

As long as "Ownership" and "property" can be arbitrarily assigned, negotiated for, divided up, and fall under different categories of laws depending on legislated edicts,often by interested parties acting in their own interests, and when "sharing" can also be defined as theft, and when ownership may be the result of greed and exploitation or just offensive levels of excess, I say there may be plenty of justifications to subvert "ownership" and "property". And in exploitative regimes, even minor acts of rebellion against greedy ownership may not merely be justified, they may be necessary.

[wanderingfool2]

1 hour ago, Bitter said:

Maybe theft of sale is a more appropriate term.

 

Piracy of academic materials is always OK in my opinion. $250 for a text book is theft.

I had a professor who "wrote"  his own textbook and made it part of his curriculum.  The thing is that every few years he would switch up the wording/questions in the book in order to force people from just buying new copies of it.  I really hated that guy; and the one case where I pirated out of sheer spite.

[ToboRobot]

1 hour ago, Bitter said:

Maybe theft of sale is a more appropriate term.

 

Piracy of academic materials is always OK in my opinion. $250 for a text book is theft.

Interesting way to value knowledge and education.

 

[ToboRobot]

On 10/31/2023 at 6:14 AM, PowerNet said:

I have A Internet Café In Yemen (Posted about it on Reddit PCMR)

https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/wh4d8x/one_year_of_opening_my_dream_project_in_yemen/

Living here it always came to mind why Piracy is Big Here. We don't have Cinemas and The Internet is in Kbps, But does that Justify taking some ones hard work?
It is said that 100k of jobs are lost each year and billions in revenue lost.

Let me Know, what is your relationship with Online Piracy and would you ever justify it?

I also went into details about this Issue of Piracy in Yemen in a Video

<link removed by staff>

I think an easy line to draw is it is wrong to steal (IP,software,content) and make profit selling the fruits of theft. 

 

[QuantumSingularity]

Growing up in a small Balkan country in the early 2000s was pirate utopia. We already had excellent internet in MB/s, not kbps. One of the largest FTP servers in Europe was at my home town and the temp "copyright law" was basically unheard of. Back then the LAN internet used to cost the equivalent of $10 USD, not much by any western standards, but people used to get paid about $150-$200 a month, so not a small sum. But for that money we had a full 100Mbps local connection with global speeds reaching over 5MB/s or 40Mbps in a time when most of the world was still dragging behind in Kbps. My hometown ISP back then was amongst the top 3 fastest ISPs... IN THE WORLD. So many people took pride in that and it was almost a civil duty for every home in my hometown to have internet. A single movie ticket used to cost the same as the whole month worth of internet. Same goes for a single DVD release. So why go to the movie theatre when for the same price you can watch ALL the movies you could ever want. DVD players were kinda expensive, but justified and we often gathered at someone's house to watch a movie on the DVD player. Some of my best mvoie experiences were movies like the original The Fast and The Furious or the original Resident Evil, watching them first time with 20 of my friends. So an entire generation, my generation grew on the mindset that movies are basically free as long as you pay for internet.

With games it was even worse. A single game like Half Life used to cost $50. That was 1/3rd of most households' monthly income. So naturally EVERYBODY pirated games. Any kind of software had the same fate, even Windows. In the period between 2000 to 2010 it was basically unheard of anyone buying a game or a program or paying for a Windows license, except for the top 1%-ers. In 2010 steam gradually started gaining popularity and some people were now able to afford a game or two. It wasn't actually until 6-7 years ago that a major tone shift was felt, where people were finally starting to pay for the products they use. But as i mentioned earlier - my entire generation, the millennial generation grew up with "free" movies, games and software and that still shows in our buying behavior. We would still go and download a pirated version of a game, play it for a bit and buy it only if we like that game and want to continue play it. Netflix just managed to make downloading movies from torrent trackers a thing of the past here and suddenly decided to completely annihilate itself. Now people are again downloading the movies directly from the the torrent trackers, building personal libraries and watching whatever they like whenever they like. If they don't have it, they download it and watch it. As for software, aside from Windows or some anti-virus software, everything else is largely pirated because of the insane prices. Adobe's products being the worst offenders. 

 

So is piracy bad - if you try to make money out of it, of course it's bad. But if you just use it for your personal experience, you don't stand to make profit and it helps you feel more positive towards life, i can't say i blame you. Been there, done that and never for a second regret it. Every person has the right to be happy. If that happiness is a movie or a game you download once a month, i don't consider this is evil or wrong. Do i feel bad about the multi million dollar companies that say they "lose" money they couldn't ever have in the first place - not at all. You can't lose money from people who could never afford to buy your product. You can lose from the a$$holes who use your product to make profit of other poor people. 

 

P.S

My latest piracy was testing Cities: Skylines II. I wanted to check a gameplay with my system settings, but couldn't find one online. So i downloaded the game, saw it was poorly optimized, closed it after not even 10 minutes of playing, unisntalled it and now will wait for them to fix the issues and then buy it. I like that game i have ALL of the previous Cities: Skylines 1 DLCs purchased and i loved every second i spent in it. By the looks of it i will love every second in this game as well, as soon as they fix it.

[Bitter]

5 hours ago, ToboRobot said:

Interesting way to value knowledge and education.

 

Not really. It's basically paywalling after you've payed. $250 a book times 4 or 5 classes a semester is a pretty big cost. If you can find it online for free you should. Publishers constantly push "new editions" which have small if any changes just to keep sales going by changing up some chapter order or page numbering so students can't follow along with hand me down books. At the very least try to buy used at a discount. It's so bad. Even at my PUBLIC highschool you had to pay for the workbooks which were required for classes, $20-40 a book that was going to be torn up and handed in so the publishers still got ya. It's not like they have such massive overhead when they've been republishing the same book for a decade with very small tweaks every few years to push sales. It's absolutely a racket. Pirate text books.

[GhostRoadieBL]

just my 2c but if a publisher intends to no longer host content/remove content/change versions/stop manufacturing/selling purchasable copies of software,games,videos etc and doesn't provide the ability to 'buy a copy', there can be an argument for 'piracy' by the commonly used definition.

 

Take some of the Atari or arcade games, how do you play any of these now when the vast majority are from companies which don't even exist anymore? Those companies no longer sell the games, no service or 'normal' method exists to obtain a copy even if you have the hardware/software to run them (except some on abandonware sites).

Take the original Nintendo game library, Nintendo will never make a single penny from making obscure or third party games playable on the latest console. The company has made it very clear they have no interest in allowing players to continue playing games after Nintendo decides your paid for copy is no longer profitable for their company (ie Wii and WiiU digital stores). This is the clearest argument for piracy I have ever heard. Wait for Switch 2.0 to remove backwards compatibility and Nintendo shuts down cloud save servers. 

Even the recent CS-GO to CS2 "update" is one of the most obvious oversteps from a gaming company. 'Sorry, you can't play that game you enjoy because we say so. We know the new one is buggy but sucks to be you' there is no way to play CS-GO even locally as a LAN party title. This is the same with many MMOs or multiplayer games over the years which just had servers shut off, sure you paid for a game and you have a copy but it doesn't matter without the online handshake to run.
 

This is the same as Disney's "vault" artificially creating scarcity to push up prices for old content only to bring it back when there's a lull in the release schedule. This has been done for decades and will become more common on streaming services where the subscription you pay for can have any amount of the content removed without your consent. Imagine a company repossessing your DVD library because they don't want you watching it anymore (or don't want you to watch the version you want ie StarWars or Blade Runner or LOTR)

 

If I pay for something, I own it. Taking it away without consent is theft by every definition.

If I apply the same logic to pay for a service based specifically on the content provided by the service on the date I subscribed, taking that content away is same as repossessing a DVD collection and removes value from the service. Since I'm not allowed to pay less due to the service not providing the content I signed up for, the other option is get the content I paid for another way. If the service increased the value of their service by adding more content, I'm open to paying more, but this isn't the case with Netflix/Disney+/HBO and all the rest of them who are more than willing to continue to remove more than they add while charging more (without  consent from subscribers to approve the increased charges)

Fix the company practices and you'll fix piracy, each of these companies profits are above most countries' GDP and yet they are the first to charge more. It's honestly getting to the point of piracy being justified as a form of protest against toxic business practices.
 

[Inception9269]

Only read the title and nothing else in the thread.

 

In regards to pirating video games, my personal philosophy is that it it's Nintendo then piracy isn't a choice, it's an obligation. Of all the platforms, Nintendo's the one that deserves nothing, especially with how petty, controlling, and even resentful they are to their own community and fanbase. Also given the lack of legitimate options to acquire older Nintendo titles, then by all means.

 

Aside from Nintendo, if it's 6th gen (PS2, Xbox, & GC) or earlier I see nothing wrong at all with downloading those games and playing them with emulators. If they have remakes on modern consoles or are available on Steam then the argument could be made to support them, but realistically speaking I don't think it really matters.

 

Now as far as movies and shows are concerned, I won't comment too much on that regard. I'll just leave it as if it's Netflix or Disney then the obligation is the same as is for Nintendo games.

[Biohazard777]

On 11/4/2023 at 3:33 AM, Bitter said:

Not really. It's basically paywalling after you've payed. $250 a book times 4 or 5 classes a semester is a pretty big cost. If you can find it online for free you should. Publishers constantly push "new editions" which have small if any changes just to keep sales going by changing up some chapter order or page numbering so students can't follow along with hand me down books. At the very least try to buy used at a discount. It's so bad. Even at my PUBLIC highschool you had to pay for the workbooks which were required for classes, $20-40 a book that was going to be torn up and handed in so the publishers still got ya. It's not like they have such massive overhead when they've been republishing the same book for a decade with very small tweaks every few years to push sales. It's absolutely a racket. Pirate text books.

+1 For multiple reasons.

I'll name just one (otherwise this reply will grow into a novel), that I guess not a lot of people are aware of.

Say you have a PhD and you want to to be a full-time lecturer at a university.
Welp, depending on where you are, you are probably required to publish X amount of research papers yearly (or every X years).
Fine, no issues with that, makes sense.
Obviously you can't publish anywhere you'd like, it has to be some kind of peer-reviewed journal... on some kind of "approved" list, like SCI list.
Most of the time:

• You don't get paid.
• You sign an agreement you won't publish anywhere else.
• The content is pay walled.
• You can gain free access if you donate your time to do peer reviewing.
   

So, the hard part is done on purely "volunteer" basis for most if not all research papers,
the publisher keeps all the profits while having low running costs.
And they aren't really strapped for cash... look up Elsevier for example, 40% profit margins and billions in revenue...

Should betterment of human kind be behind pay walls?
I mean people are obviously willing to do the research for free, and do the peer reviewing for free... The only remaining component is organizing people, which I bet could be done for free, and hosting - which costs peanuts nowadays.

Q: But you mentioned Elsevier as an example, why don't you publish under Open Access?
A: Sure, but unless the Uni has an agreement with them, I'd have to pay from a couple of hundreds of $ to several thousands of $ !? Heck in some cases even if agreement exists it will not cover the whole fee.
So I do the research, I pay for it to be Open Access, some "volunteers" go over it, and that is somehow a fair transaction?

Anyhow, the authors get majorly shafted in any case... And I personally absolutely do not care if you got my paper from library genesis or through a subscription, the system is insane. Heck I'd prefer if you get it from somewhere else online and not sent me an e-mail to just to ask for a copy.

[ToboRobot]

9 hours ago, GhostRoadieBL said:

If I pay for something, I own it. Taking it away without consent is theft by every definition.

 

Generally publishers pay authors for the books to sell.  If consumers feel that paying for something and having others take it without consent is theft, why wouldn't consumers understand that publishers don't want people to sell the content they pay for the ownership of?

If someone makes something with the expectation of profit, and potential customers steal the product and the anticipated revenue and profits don't materialize, there is a good chance that the business will no longer make the products that customers steal.  Might not be a good thing for consumers to steal so much the suppliers go out of business.

Can't steal food if the farm doesn't grow it.
Can't squat in a home a builder doesn't construct.
Can't steal a book the publisher never printed.
Can't download a movie never filmed.

 

[Bitter]

Spend $100 million to make a movie that rakes in over $1 billion in profit, pretty sure the movie studio doesn't need to sue some guy selling bootleg copies at the flea market who's just trying to get a little extra cash to get school clothes for his kids. Nor should that be a jail-able offense. Oh no some guy in a mansion overlooking the ocean on the California coast lost out on $5,000. I feel so badly for them while they pay someone else to sail their yacht to Spain so they can party on it. Boo hoo let me shed tears as their board their private jet for a ski vacation at their other mansion in Tahoe. Woe is me. Every business has loss. Farmers have failed crops. Not every home sells for the expected price. Not every book hits the projected sales. Not every movie is a box office hit. Not to mention that taking a cob of corn from a field is taking a cob of corn. Stealing a CD from a store is taking a CD from a store. Copying a file which was already bought by an end user to listen to it across multiple devices is what the music and movie industry wants to outlaw, they want you to buy a copy for each device, each place, each service, each vehicle, each TV, etc. Their end goal is to absolutely maximize profits over everything else. Imagine if a publisher said 'No you can't read that singular book in multiple places, you must purchase a copy for each room you wish to read in'. Yeah. It's not about the 'theft of property' it's about the loss of already generous revenue from massive corporations that exert undue influence over government to lobby laws that further enshrine their rights to profit over consumer rights to fair use.

 

Tangent, whatever happened to game demos? Remember when you could try it before you bought it to see if it sucked or if it would even run OK? Wonder why those seem to have gone away as the quality of games have also dropped.

[LogicalDrm]

17 hours ago, ewitte said:

I've tried to see the logic in calling it "stealing" but it is not.  stealing - "the action or offense of taking another person's property without permission or legal right and without intending to return it; theft:".  A copy is not the same thing, it never leaves the hands of the original party.  Personally, I don't download apps/games from unknown sources.  Who knows what was done to it.  For those types of items generally I just wait for sales or bundles with hardware.

Your definition is describing act of piracy. "taking another person's property without permission or legal right", Any paid digital media has owner who gives rights to consume it away with proper payments. Using even copy of that media without paying for it and getting so permission to consume it, is stealing. By your own definition.

 

Just say you are for it, don't try and find some logic where there is none.

 

To academic discussion, that is yet another regional/cultural difference. During my 2 degrees here (MSc and B.Eng), I have paid maybe €400 total for materials. Most are available from libraries or online. The couple I couldn't get from library I did bought. One of them was used as reference for my thesis. I don't claim I didn't use illegal methods. One of my resources was hard to obtain (library gave estimate of 6 months + several hundred of euros for maybe couple of lines and one picture). So for that, I used scanned copy that was available and OCR to get the parts I needed.

[GhostRoadieBL]

9 hours ago, ToboRobot said:

If consumers feel that paying for something and having others take it without consent is theft, why wouldn't consumers understand that publishers don't want people to sell the content they pay for the ownership of?

that's more about ownership by possession of an object or item rather than ownership in the contract sense.

The publisher pays content creators (sometimes) for the right to sell copies of the content for the purpose of profit. The publisher then advertises, creates copies or reproduces the content to provide it to the consumer. (this absolutely constitutes them being paid for the service)

However, this is only due to the publisher having a large enough audience or reach for the publisher to make a profit on the creator's creation.

 

I'm most familiar with book publishing so this is the standard process for most published authors using a publishing company. This actually changed when Kindle and E-books became the more popular medium. Amazon pays almost nothing to Kindle authors regardless of what the e-book is sold for and often puts books on kindle ultimate for even less payouts to authors. This has been common in the physical book publishers as well with most authors making 5-10% in royalties, before publishers take their 85% cut and add fees or additional costs for traveling to signings/readings/sending copies to reviewers. I would put the more accurate profit at 2-5% or under a dollar going to the author per book sold.
e-books are a better margin at 25% but the e-books are often sold for <$5 so it's a bit more but no real difference and much worse when Amazon puts your book on sale without telling you. (valve has been caught doing this with games too)

 

This is where the problem shows up, is the author's work worth 2% of the payment from the book or is the only reason the publisher exists is because they can extort authors by being the only way to reach a larger audience?

This is why publishers exclusively want people to purchase new copies from them instead of having a second hand market. They make no profit from the second hand items, traded or self published works.

The second hand market has been almost eliminated for most product categories by the hands of publishers; Movies, Music, Games, Cars (subscribe for heated seats/battery capacity) all have locks or methods in place for you to never be able to sell or give away the product you paid for exclusively to force people to buy new and remove the possibility of resale. The publisher already got paid for their effort on the initial sale, and the publisher didn't even create the content they're scalping to customers, why should scalpers receive payments for things they no longer own after the initial sale?

 

9 hours ago, ToboRobot said:

if someone makes something with the expectation of profit, and potential customers steal the product and the anticipated revenue and profits don't materialize, there is a good chance that the business will no longer make the products that customers steal

This is a classic chicken and egg problem with a giant caveat.

If someone makes something with the expectation of profit and the price/quality and availability attract customers, they will make the profit expected. 

If someone makes something and customers exclusively steal the product to the point the business folds, the business owner has not created a profitable product and failed to provide enough value to the customers who 'stole' the product. The business didn't value the product correctly to attract a payment.

 

That's the chicken and egg problem, customers will only pay for something they deem valuable, value is currently dictated by the company (apparently) in response to consumer choices. I'd like to see Apple and Nvidia explain that theory by how their products are priced up with no value added.

Neither of these is accurate for the commonly pirated industries though since it's rare to pirate a physical product.

In reality, a movie studio pays $20 million for a movie while cutting pay for actors, writers, grips, camera operators, and everyone except the few headline actors and dumps the majority of the payment into advertising the film. Then they turn around and make $100million in profit for the studio and executives without sharing a penny with the people who created the movie.

This is the problem with the "value" of the product, you could price movies at 1/5th the ticket price and still cover the cost of the film, make it 1/4 the price and still make a tidy profit while providing a more attractive value to the consumer.

Best example is IronMan (>$750million profit for the theater and physical media sales from a $180million all in cost, not even counting merchandising profit) could have made every future Marvel movie free to attend at theaters and Disney would have still turned a profit from concessions, toys, paid appearances, theme park tie ins, blu-ray sales and Disney+ subscriptions. Explain the 'value' calculation when the profits vastly outrun the costs and the company doesn't adjust accordingly. Toxic capitalism causes piracy by degrading the value of products compared to the profits earned. I would never even consider pirating from a company pocketing 10% profit, even 20% but 400%? that's a tough sell for a company worried about "profits don't materialize".

[ewitte]

On 11/3/2023 at 4:22 PM, ToboRobot said:

Interesting way to value knowledge and education.

 

TBH unless you want to be a doctor, lawyer, etc. free learning is just as good as paid learning.  Especially if you just cert your way in and after a few years the experience is worth more to most employers than any degree.  Really, they don't trust you with book smarts to be a doctor either you have to intern to learn and prove yourself.

[ToboRobot]

9 minutes ago, ewitte said:

TBH unless you want to be a doctor, lawyer, etc. free learning is just as good as paid learning.  Especially if you just cert your way in and after a few years the experience is worth more to most employers than any degree.  Really, they don't trust you with book smarts to be a doctor either you have to intern to learn and prove yourself.

Sorry you are missing the point.

Imagine going to someone and saying, "Wow, this thing you have made is incredible.  Give it to me for free."

On one hand you think it has value when it comes to praise, on the other hand you show it has no value because you aren't willing to pay anything for it.

I've worked in the book industry so I am well aware of all the arguments and value of books.  So I can easily point out the logical contradictions people make in their arguments.