The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you’ve already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations.
The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you’ve already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations.
The action is still harmless. Information should be free.
https://www.rogerclarke.com/II/IWtbF.html
How is creating a popular a novel any different than creating a popular object? Hundreds of hours of labor go into both and the creators are entitled to the full value of said labor.
Say you have an amazing story about the vacation you took last year, and told all your friends about it. You would justifiably be pissed if you later found out one of your friends was telling that story as if they had done it. It’s the same for someone who writes a book or any other form of media.
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We aren’t talking about plagiarism, the friend would be telling the story about you still.
Spoken word narratives are such an integral part of culture, imagine if your grandpa told you to never repeat any of the stories of his childhood because “he owns the copywrite”. Insane. That’s what you are suggesting.
Ideas are not objects. Having good ideas shared incurs no loss to anybody, except imagined “lost potential value”.
I’m saying that those who create are entitled to the value of what they create. If a company asks to look iver some of your work before hiring you, says that they aren’t interested, and then you see them using that work afterwards i doubt you would be saying “well, information should be free”.
If you want to write stories, draw pictures, make movies or webshows and distribute then for free ti everyone, then that’s a noble initiative, but creatives depend on what they create for their livelyhood.
Here I was thinking we all deserved a giant meteor.
The publisher example is one of a difference in power and you’re saying that IP is there to protect the author. Except this whole video is about how that doesn’t happen anymore. The law is written and litigated by those with power.
That happens already.
If the situation is reversed, the hammer comes down on the independent artist.
We need stronger worker and consumer protections. Copywrite is a shit solution.
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I do see where you’re coming from, but not necessarily. If my friend has zero interest in ever buying said book (or can’t afford to) and would never become a paying customer, there is no downside to sharing a copy. In fact, if they like the book enough, they may even become incentivized to buy themselves a copy or look into the author’s other work legitimately when they otherwise wouldn’t have.
This is how/why I pirate most games. I don’t have the type of pocket money to spend on games I don’t know I’ll love, so I pirate them first. If they’re good enough, I’ll buy the actual game on steam later. Spider-Man, Baldur’s Gate 3, Cassette Beasts, etc. are all games I plan to buy when I can afford to. And I can promise I never would have bought Slime Rancher 2 if I hadn’t pirated the first one at some point and enjoyed it.
I’m exactly the same way. The point is that you’re paying for the things you want to see more of. That’s where my prior comments about value matter in this context. If your friend wasn’t interested in purchasing and you share a copy, then there’s no difference on the value side other than, without your purchase, they wouldn’t be able to ingest that content. The risk of the opposite, though, is far greater when there are no physical limitations. Even in the library scenario someone mentioned earlier, the libraries are still paying for the initial purchase and the number of rentals inform their future purchases so the author still retains some value from that and their livelihood is still supported.
Mind you, I’m not against piracy. What I’m against is people pirating and then pretending that it’s not stealing. You may not be stealing a physical item but you’re still stealing value and income from the creator. What you’re doing at least returns value and income to creators whose work you enjoy. I feel like people here ignore that because they’re not personally affected by it.
I own a production company. We make everything from graphics, video, audio, 3D models, to custom per-project hardware builds. A few years ago, a small subset of my team decided we wanted to make a video game for iOS/Android. We released it at 99 cents. On Android, it was available for pirating on day 1 and we had planned for that inevitability so our player stats included a tag in our reporting that recognized that. We only got about 300,000 downloads worldwide on Android and, of those, about half were pirated plays. If 100,000 of those people had paid the 99 cents, that would have been life changing for us, at the time. We could have paid off the house we were using as an office at the time. We blew it off initially as “eh, they probably wouldn’t have paid for it anyways” or “they probably pirated it just because they could and tried it once and stopped playing” but, much to our surprise, the player population that played it the most (over 70,000 that played for at least 10 minutes every day) were the pirates. We even added cosmetic transactions after the fact to try and recoup some of those users and made packs for 99 cents. They kept playing but pirated the packs and used them for free. The game studio side of things died and we shut it down afterwards. If even half of the half of people who pirated and played the game daily had paid any one of the 99 cent costs, we could have funded more content or more games. I find it hard to believe that that many people hated our game but still played daily and didn’t even like it enough to pay slightly more than the cost of a stamp for our team’s work.
You know who pays for our work every time? Movie studios, production companies, video game developers. People shouldn’t be surprised when they’re feeding the very monster they’re complaining about and killing the alternatives and, worse yet, attempting to justify their theft as being moral. Just admit you’re stealing and let’s be adults and figure out a way to not have to keep the existing, shitty system afloat.
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The end result is not the same. You can’t physically reproduce and share a book fast enough, for free to create the same dent that you can by digitally reproducing something ad infinitum. I didn’t miss the point. Again, you missed the point of the thread that you responded to. You didn’t respond to the main thread on this post, you responded to a comment that the authors of this content deserve the income and value of the media you’re ingesting.
You’re just a dishonest person. I don’t want you on my side. You don’t see the harm you’re causing and then attempt to justify it because you’re a bad person who doesn’t care if you’re hurting people and stealing their livelihood just so you can have something like an entitled child. On top of that, you keep pretending like I missed the point when you keep ignoring the point you responded to. Just go away.
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There is a difference here between lending or resale of a physical product. Can you sell a second hand book? Typically, yes. Can you do mental gymnastics to draw a parallel to reselling a digital version? Evidently, also yes.
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FTFY.
Including your personal information?
Strawman. Is intellectual property the same as personally identifiable information? Can you doxx a director using their movie?
Comment I replied to said information.
No reasonable person who says “information should be free” is also lumping in PII with that. It’s clear from the context in this thread that they are referring to media and knowledge (seeing how the post itself was about media and everyone has been discussing the justifiability of things like piracy amid the erosion of digital ownership), not about posting where people live and shit, so you bringing up personal information is at best a misunderstanding of what the saying “information should be free” actually means or at worst a logical fallacy and deliberate attempt to derail the conversation.
Also, just saying, personal information is currently free regardless of whether or not it should be or whether it’s legal or ethical. There are thousands of websites indexable by search engines that list people’s information for anyone to take, mostly from data breaches or otherwise scraped from the internet. It’s one of the main ways scammers get your contact info. There are even websites specifically dedicated to archiving doxxes, hosted in jurisdictions with no privacy laws so the victim can never get it removed. Search your own phone number or email, I bet you’ll find it listed somewhere possibly with a ton of your other information. Unlicensed movies are immediately struck off the internet as soon as they’re discovered though, funny how the law takes pirating movies more seriously than the posting of private information that can literally ruin people’s lives and make them a target of assault, stalking, vandalism, etc.
What is exactly “information” in this statement? Is a feature length movie “information” that needs to be shared freely? At 4K freely or will HD suffice for the meaning? Or is it just a plot summary? I’m in the camp that will argue just the latter.