this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
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Would you call it Piracy if I lend a bluray from a friend? I didn't pay for it and yet I've watched it.
No, because it's so widespread and natural that it should be expected and already accounted for in the price. But there is no hard line imo, and simplified examples often fail to capture all the aspects that go into the decision. E.g. I'd say paying for one person at a concert and sneaking in another would basically be piracy, even though the two situations are very similar on a surface level.
I think it's about reasonable expectations both parties of the agreement can have, based on established social norms. If you buy a movie for personal consumption you should be able to expect that you can watch it whenever you want, and also share that experience with friends and family. And at the same time the seller should be able to expect that you limit it to a reasonable number of personal contacts, and don't start to sell it to strangers or run a movie theater, because that expectation was used to set the price.
So if piracy was "widespread and natural" it'd be bueno?
If that would be possible then yes, or course.
That's bascially the Start Trek future, where everybody's needs are met and people can just do whatever they want. It doesn't "cost" anything to create stuff, so it's fine to copy everything for free. But that's not the reality we are living in. In our's somebody has to pay for things, and if everyone pirated everything then things couldn't be made anymore.
An example where it kinda works is open source software. People don't charge for copies, because they expect to get help with their work and also be allowed to use other OS software without paying for it. As long as that balance holds it works out fine, but there are a lot of projects that required too much investment from the creator's and didn't provide enough back for them to keep going. And even there, companies profiting from OS projects are expected or even required to pay it back, by contributing code and paying for engineers and sponsorships.
To further the thought experiment. I digitize my Blu-ray and put it on a private tracker to share with ONLY my friends. Is that piracy?
Copywrite laws are antiquated at best and need to be destroyed at worst.
If you need more proof look at bullshit like how Paramount+ until recently couldn't show flagship shows like Picard in Canada because the rights were given to Crave.
So as a consumer I want to go to the owner of the property and I can't watch it because the owner told me they gave a copy of it to someone else.
Trust me, they're working on ways to prevent that too as we speak.