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  • LAVA Moderator: Shinji Ikari

Ethics of Online Pirating

A car is ones own property. A piece of data is not. A piece of data is thousands of bytes of information, jumbled together to make music or other content. A car cannot be cloned at the loss of nothing. A piece of data can.

I dont steal cars because i dont steal. I am guilty of cloning data, and nothing else. I dont believe anyone has the right to call data as ones own property. If you publicly release it, much like 'art' of all kinds, its public domain. I can take a picture of the mona lisa, get it printed and hang it up in my house cant i? Or is that theft? 8(
 
CoffeeDrinker said:
Are you serious?
That's awfully presumptuous. The majority of stuff on youtube never generates actual revenue for the artists because its no different from the source of torrents: random people putting their music collections online. Does your righteousness make you examine every single song on youtube thoroughly to make sure its been properly sourced and permitted? For the sake of your soul do you only enjoy youtube videos that have followed all the necessary guidelines? If not, then you are helping to violate copyright laws in some way shape or form and have no room to talk. Your main argument is that you are still playing catch-up from your heyday as a limewire user, and so therefore everyone else must consume music at the same pace as you?
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Yes, I am serious. It's become a disease in our era.

My "righteousness" doesn't make me examine every song for its source, but makes me examine the time I spend looking for the newest music to quench the thirst for sound. Moreover, none of the following: the government; music producers; nor Youtube keep up songs on Youtube if they violate copyright laws. If they want to change the laws regarding such, they may. However, it is currently illegal to *download* music and videos that are copyrighted. That is where the difference herein lies. I'll watch one video on Youtube (probably something I've heard on the radio -- gee, isn't that copyrighted too?!) once or twice. It's good advertising, in my opinion, when it's on such a large Internet site. So they still get something out of it. They get absolutely nothing when you pirate it.

I am not playing catch-up on my iTunes playlist. It's still sitting there. I've given up and have realized that the best music is nature anyway.
 
Comparing piracy to stealing a physical object is ridiculous. A better analogy is someone taking a scan of your new car and and then making an exact replica. Sure the car dealer misses out on a sale but you as the owner do not "lose" anything. The same can be argued for a covers band who is able to sing a song note perfect to an original song. What happens now with technology that allows someone to replicate instruments on a computer? I am surprised that no one has developed a programe that simply "replicates" every instrument on a track and then pieces it together to create a facsimilie of the original. Is this still stealing a product?

I don't believe that art can not be a business. I have no problems paying top dollar seeing a band live (hell even a knob pushing DJ) but once again it comes down to perceived value. An Andy warhol print is not strictly speaking worth $20million, unless someone is willing to pay for it I guess. Similarly a digital track is not worth any where near the amount that record companies would like to believe.
 
on pirating games:
if more companies would go the steam route and reduce the price of older games, i think they would sell more of them. as it stands, if you buy a game used, the publishers/developers get nothing. they should probably do the same thing with music and movies too. same thing if you release a shitty movie/game/album, reduce the price, you might sell a few more units.
 
If someone is unhappy with a service I provide I give them their money back. I have yet to receive a refund from a dud movie or an album with only one killer track.
 
Digital downloading represents the masses liberating our culture, rather than allowing a few groups(publisher and not creators take the lions share of the profit anyway) to own our culture.

fuck the riaa/mpaa
 
Troll thread. Way to go, OP!

jk

atri said:
on pirating games:
if more companies would go the steam route and reduce the price of older games, i think they would sell more of them. as it stands, if you buy a game used, the publishers/developers get nothing. they should probably do the same thing with music and movies too. same thing if you release a shitty movie/game/album, reduce the price, you might sell a few more units.
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I want a return for Mass Effect 3? False advertising.
 
L2R said:
i think what i was getting at is a criticism of art as a profit. kind of like human services, i don't think the two should mix.

here's a question: is art a human service?
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Busty St Clare said:
I don't believe that art can not be a business.
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It seems to me that the debate between the commercial value of art versus the intrinsic value or the art itself spreading has always been an issue. What if art is, and always has been, part business, part indulgence, part subjective and objective? This is going to sound stoned of me, but art is just art. It's its own category of human society.
Even during the Middle Ages, you could argue that all those religious paintings were made simply because it was the Church who had the money at the time. Though heavenly graces might have been seen as some sort of currency back then. People have to eat, and I'm against any attempt to rationalize taking money away from people who work hard at whatever they chose to do with their careers, whether it's the owner of the factory that makes the CDs, or the jerk-off producer just looking to get a song as lowest common denominator as possible. What is being done is massively affecting their income, which is why I make no bones about the fact that I am stealing something in some way, but, at the same time, who's fault is it that the products they sold us are so given to being burned, copied, and distributed? They unwittingly sold us a product that had far more capability than they ever wanted us to use.
 
It's not the product itself that has the capability, it's just that we've figured out how to replicate all that can be seen and heard. These mediums can be captured, deconstructed, repackaged and shot down a wire at the speed of light to anywhere in the world. It's actually pretty exciting. So anyone who has a business making money on things that can be seen and heard (as opposed to tasted, smelled or touched) has to deal with the utopian leap in technology, which allows us to share it freely.

Once that which can be tasted, smelled and touched can be as easily replicated, an economy built on scarcity of resources will be no longer and we will have shifted into the next stage of human evolution.
 
Mass Effect 3 is having a re-released ending as DLC apparently. Its free if Im not mistaken but god damn thats weak.

Bioware is falling fast in my book
 
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