You know what say: if buying isn’t owning then pirating isn’t stealing.
Pirating isn't stealing because it's addition not subtraction. You're creating more of a thing not taking a thing away from someone who had a thing. Actually what Sony is doing here is closer to stealing as people had a thing they purchased and now they don't.
More like guidelines than actual rules
PaRleyyy!
Here’s my risky comment of the day.
I think piracy isn’t like stealing, but it’s still wrong in some interesting and nuanced ways. Just so you know, I’m in no position to judge people for pirating, because I’ve done my fair share of sailing the high seas. However, I would still like to discuss the ethical aspects of piracy and how it compares with stealing.
IMO, calling it stealing is completely wrong, but free-riding or trespassing could be more suitable words for this. Obviously, the movie industry would love to compare it with the most severe crime they can come up with, but they certainly have financial incentives behind that reasoning. I’m looking at it from a more neutral perspective.
Stealing has clear and direct harm associated with it, whereas the effects of piracy are more subtle and indirect. Free-riding a bus or sneaking into a circus (AKA trespassing) are somewhat similar, but there’s clear indirect harm. If you watch a football match from the outside of the fence, it’s probably still considered free-riding, but I would put that into a completely different category. IMO it’s also closer to piracy than the other examples.
Most pirates shouldn’t be counted as lost customers, so the argument about depriving the creator of their rightful income is only partially correct. If pirating wasn’t possible, but paying for the movie was, vast majority of these people would prefer to do something else like, go outside and play football with friends. To some extent, piracy still does reduce the demand for the pirated material, so there’s an indirect harm associated with it, and that’s what makes it unethical IMO. Still not wrong enough that I would stop doing it, especially considering what the alternatives are. Again, I have no moral high ground in this situation, and I’m willing to call my own actions unethical. You can call yours whatever you want.
Piracy isn't stealing, the same way riding the subway without a ticket isn't stealing.
To some extent, piracy still does reduce the demand for the pirated material, so there’s an indirect harm associated with it, and that’s what makes it unethical
I get your point, especially when it concerns smaller/independent artists. But how would a "fair compensation" look like? Do top selling artists deserve the millions (or even billions) of dollars? Does someone even deserve hundreds of thousands of dollars? Does any artist deserve more money for doing something they love and where they can express themselves than a nurse working night shifts? Is it fair to keep earning money for some work that was done years ago? Does that mean a nurse should get a percentage of the income of every person's life they helped save?
I think the only ethical thing to do is to decouple consumption and support. E.g. I might support some artist by buying their album (or going to their shows), because I think their voice is important, not because it's an album I listen the most to. Or I might not pay artists at all and give money to political causes or other people that need support. Or I might support them in some other way etc.
This is where our lazy lawmakers need to step in and protect consumers. Make it illegal to revoke these types of licenses over greedy, lazy, exploitative business mergers and acquisitions. If corporations want to fight that, then they shouldn't be able to "sell" digital movies or games anymore: Any time you go to "purchase" digital content, it must plainly tell you that you're renting said content for an undetermined amount of time.
Funny how so much recent talk has emerged yet again about how companies like Microsoft want to get rid of disc drives on their next Xbox... It's almost like companies don't actually want you to ever truly own anything. A rent economy is toxic and rotten, and it's infuriating that it's literally becoming our entire economy.
Companies change the contracts all the time and customers just agree to them.
Consumer protection would help, so maybe it’s time to start voting for the people who support it.
I've been boycotting Sony since the CD rootkit debacle & haven't regretted my decision yet.
I forgot about that whole thing. For those that need a reminder like me:
Damn i remember that shit.
Its barely the second month of the year and these companies are nose diving to the fucking bottom.
IIRC, though, that wasn’t Sony’s decision - WB yanked the licenses because they wanted those shows to only be on their streaming platform.
So it’s just irony that Sony is doing the same thing now.
Once they sold the copies, then the licenses for those copies were no longer Sony's or WB's to yank.
This shit is no different whatsoever from a store owner breaking into customers' houses to steal back products they'd bought and paid for to settle a payment dispute with a supplier.
“The bar you had to clear was on the ground and y’all brought shovels.”
🏴☠️ sharing is caring.
I am altering the deal. Pray that I don’t alter it any further.
Sony won the case against Universal that allowed people to record TV shows with their VCR. I wonder how they'd feel if I pointed OBS at their streams.
If what they're doing isn't theft, then digital "piracy" isn't theft either.
And with the unrelated rumours of Microsoft potentially leaving the console business and going multiplatform, it begs serious questions.
Do you really want Sony to have a monopoly on console gaming when they can't even respect ownership rights for digital goods?
Tbf I left the console market a decade ago and haven't really felt like going back. Computers do everything I need in the gaming sphere
if you can take it from me, I can take it from you. piracy has become a moral imperative to stop valuable art being flushed down the memory hole.
Sony should be fined for each unit they delete.
if they pull this shit with music, i'm gonna have to look for self hosted music streaming apps.
Why stream music when SD cards are approaching TB?
Because 90% of standard phones now don't have SD card slots. Thanks pixel
You vote with your wallets. Each time you buy a phone without SD cart, you are submitting a ballot.
Seriously. phones are 99% identical anyways. It's not so hard to filter for the 2-3 criteria you actually care about.
I would also like a great camera, a non-locked-down bootloader and a non-customized OS with updates for at least 5 years. I can't vote with my wallet aside from "not buying any phone", which isn't a vote.
Oh I would also like small smartphones back. But there are simply no good ones on the market; nothing I could vote for.
"Vote with your wallet" only works if there is a good enough set of choices on the market.
I'm using jellyfin and it just works fine.
There are others more specialized in music. But I kind of like only having to use one service for all my media.
When my plex server does what Sony won’t/ can’t.
This is why we prefer to buy physical media, getting a digital with it is nice, but physical is key.
It wasn't even me was pushing for us to get physical media, it was my spouse. Of course my plex server the house probably helped. But after a few "forever" is only until next month, or shows completely disappearing altogether from any streaming, they started pushing for more physical media.
Good news, physical media can still have revocable DRM
Digital ownership is a real issue. We need to ensure we own when we buy, or we should not buy
We gonna go after every company that does this because pretty much all of them are.
I'm game.
I’m down to one streaming service left. Just need to… ahem… acquire the rest of what I want to watch there before I no longer pay monthly for services I barely use, where anything can be ripped away from us at any time.
Never again.
Someone is going to be a high seas king after this for sure.
But in addition to offering video streaming, Funimation also dubbed and released anime as physical media, and sometimes those DVDs or Blu-rays would feature a digital code. Subscribers to the Funimation streaming service could add those digital codes to Funimation and then stream the content from the platform.
Okay, I honestly feel bad for anyone not old enough to remember the last few times big media firms pulled this kind of crap. This kind of thing is always a trap, or at best a temporary add-on to the media you purchased. If you buy a DVD or BluRay, anything other than the videos on the medium have a short shelf life. Plus, anything having to do with internet websites are considered disposable by big business*, but doubly so in this kind of scheme.
In the past we've had bolt-on features to media that have aged poorly. 1-800 support numbers for video games. Websites with supplementary media. Executable programs on disk that only work on Windows95 or MacOS 9. Console exclusive content. Extra media on disk in formats like Flash. Heck, there are even old cassettes and LPs that have C64 BASIC programs on them. Downloadable game content through redeemable codes. The end result is less a product value-add and more of a novelty.
Then there's the litany of broken-by-design media, like DivX. And of course, let's not forget about formats that have no modern release and are only viewable on players that haven't been made in a dozen years or more.
Yes, Sony/Funimation should be taken to task for misleading advertising. But we should also be vigilant and look for the warning signs too.
(* - If that makes you uncomfortable about IoT devices, you're paying attention.)
This is nothing new. Buying digital and streaming only versions of media just means you are licensing it. If you care, either break the DRM and reencode, or just pirate it directly.
I feel more and more justified about piracy every article I read about licensing and stuff just getting taken away after having paid good money for stuff
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