Earlier, after review, we blocked and removed several communities that were providing assistance to access copyrighted/pirated material, which is currently not allowed per Rule #1 of our Code of Conduct. The communities that were removed due to this decision were:
We took this action to protect lemmy.world, lemmy.world’s users, and lemmy.world staff as the material posted in those communities could be problematic for us, because of potential legal issues around copyrighted material and services that provide access to or assistance in obtaining it.
This decision is about liability and does not mean we are otherwise hostile to any of these communities or their users. As the Lemmyverse grows and instances get big, precautions may happen. We will keep monitoring the situation closely, and if in the future we deem it safe, we would gladly reallow these communities.
The discussions that have happened in various threads on Lemmy make it very clear that removing the communites before we announced our intent to remove them is not the level of transparency the community expects, and that as stewards of this community we need to be extremely transparent before we do this again in the future as well as make sure that we get feedback around what the planned changes are, because lemmy.world is yours as much as it is ours.
I’m sure this comment will receive plenty of hate, but I’m really struggling to understand why piracy seems to get so staunchly defended by seemingly everyone here. Piracy is stealing. It is morally wrong. We can argue all day about how it’s a ‘victimless crime’ or how media conglomerates are greedy and deserve it, but at the end of the day there’s nothing that makes it ‘right’. With maybe a few exceptions, no one needs the things they’re pirating and it’s just childish to refuse to pay for content and go on pretending it’s a necessity. What needs to happen is more money going to the creators whose content we all enjoy so much.
There’s plenty of places to go where you can still interact with these communities, and we shouldn’t be surprised that a large and general instance wants to be distant from them. Personally I applaud the decision.
you do have a point, but piracy could be seen as a response to restrictive pricing models and accessibility issues set by media conglomerates. those high prices and regional restrictions can limit people’s ability to access content, especially in economically disadvantaged regions, which doesn’t really sound fair to me.
you’re right it’s not a necessity but if someone downloads a movie they wouldn’t have purchased otherwise, it doesn’t necessarily equate to a lost sale for the creator.
i pirate games because the repacks of some of the AAA games consume less bandwidth when installing and doesn’t have DRM that eats my resources in the background. and if it works well, i end up buying it with no regrets. i feel like everybody should have that freedom to do whatever they want.
I absolutely agree with you that piracy is largely a response to real issues that businesses should address. Of course it’s not fair that a subscription fee will feel different to people of different economic status. I guess it’s tough to feel the individual side of that.
I enjoyed the first few seasons of Star Trek Discovery (another reason for me to get downvotes lol). It was on Netflix in my country and then shortly before a new season was due to start CBS pulled it for their own platform. It wasn’t even available for months. I was disappointed but I’ve never seen the newer episodes. I really appreciate your reasoning and don’t judge you for it, I just personally feel that I won’t buy a product if I don’t like the box it comes in etc.
Whether piracy is morally wrong is subjective, the only thing that really matters here is legal liability. I’ll give an example. My kid’s DS screen broke and she lost many expensive digital games that she had purchased because the serial number sticker fell off and Nintendo doesn’t save that info to the SD card. I don’t think this scenario fits into your moral argument.
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“We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem,” he said. “If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.” - king Gaben
You’re a moron. Piracy is not stealing because nothing is ever taken from the copyright holder, unless you’re going to argue that a theoretical purchase is being stolen. By which logic, deciding not to buy something is stealing.
Insults aside, I think this is a bit of a stretch honestly. You could say the same thing about huge swathes of the information sector.
This is a pretty weak analogy, but I hope it illustrates my feelings on this. Imagine a museum that charged for entry, to help pay for its staff and for maintenance. And say you could break in at night without damaging anything, just to look at the artifacts for free. You may not be stealing, as as you say perhaps you would never pay for entry, but you are choosing to deny other human beings any kind of compensation for the work they’ve done. If everybody did this, how would the museum continue to function?
Piracy is not theft. It is infringement. There are two different words in the laws used to describe these because they are two different things. Here’s the simple (and subtly incomplete) way to distinguish them.
When theft has happened, the property is somehow unavailable to the owner. If I have a pen and someone steals it, I cannot pick up my pen and write. If I have a hundred dollars and someone steals it, I can’t take my wife out to that special dinner I had planned. And so on. You’ll note (as with the hundred dollars) that the property in question doesn’t have to even be physical. That hundred dollars could just be a number in my bank account that’s now 100 lower. It remains theft because that property is now no longer available to me, the rightful owner.
Infringement, conversely, does not remove the ability to use the property from the owner. If you produce a song and I make a copy of it, you still have the song. You can still play it. You can still try to sell it. You can do whatever you like with it. I have not removed it from you. If you have an idea for a product and I use industrial espionage to get that idea for my own use, you can still use it. It has not been removed from you.
Now what has potentially been removed from you in infringement, which is why there is both civil and criminal infringement, is the possibility of profiting from the work you put into the property. If I take your song and make it freely available, you can’t sell it. You haven’t lost the song, but you’ve lost the ability to pay rent or eat for sales of it. If I take your product idea and sell it cheaper (because I didn’t pay the R&D costs for it, say), you haven’t lost the idea, but you’ve lost the ability to recoup the expenses it took to get the idea into a usable state. So I’m not saying that piracy is always good, nor am I saying it’s always bad. I’m saying it isn’t theft.
“But if you get it without paying $10 (to pick a number out of thin air) for that album, you’ve stolen that $10 from me!” No. No I haven’t. Unless you want to also make the risible claim that if I choose not to have the album at all I’ve also stolen that $10 from you. You never had the $10. Ever. It was never your property. Ergo it cannot be theft if I merely don’t give it to you, no matter what the circumstances leading to that decision not to give it to you. I’ve infringed, sure. But to call it theft is just plain wrong. And I don’t mean “wrong” in a moral sense. I mean “wrong” in the very technical literal sense.
Thanks for the distinction, I enjoyed reading your message. I would still say that in a colloquial manner it’s not reaching that far to call piracy stealing, but I take your point.
I wouldn’t try to make the point you said about not paying $10 being theft itself, I agree that that isn’t a valid argument. What I do feel is that to say “your work is worth nothing to me” while simultaneously consuming and enjoying it, is hypocritical and similar to other less favoured actions like trying to pay someone in ‘exposure’. It does largely have damaging effects on wider communities.
I agree with you that there’s nuance and that I probably came on a little strong in my original comment. When it comes to TV, films, games, and music though, which is what I’m guessing is the vast majority of piracy discussed here, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to pay or to otherwise just not consume whatever content. Again I understand there’s more than just those 4 things, and even within those listed categories there may be things like games and films that are not even purchasable. I’m not trying to suggest we should all be perfect and piracy should never happen or whatever, it’s just odd to me that it seems to get so much defense that it almost feels like the consensus is that it’s something to be proud of.
That’s because IP holders have done their job of muddying the distinction well.
I agree with the mods’ decision, because they have to CYA. Whether a law is right or not is immaterial, they need to protect themselves and Lemmy.world from being taken down by law enforcement, web hosts, or what have you. At the end of the day, “morality” (which we all disagree on) simply doesn’t matter - but material consequences do.
However - piracy is not stealing. Stealing means depriving someone else of something. Cf, “You wouldn’t download a car” - which was hysterical, because of course you would, if it was free and deprived no one of anything.
And is it morally wrong? You assert that like it’s a fact, but obviously many people disagree. What formal system of ethics are you, personally, basing your morals on? Christ? I don’t remember intellectual property mentioned in the Bible. Kant? Maybe - in a world with a categorical imperative to pirate, there might be less incentive to produce piratable content. But I’m not necessarily convinced, because stories, songs, and art all existed prior to the invention of copyright.
Piracy is just copying data around. The moral or ethical implications of that are a matter of personal belief and social norms, which have informed the creation of law (and vice versa). But the history of IP is a lot more complicated than simply “enforcing morality”.
If copyright law had existed contemporaneously with the advent of the printing press,the dissemination of books to the masses would have been much slower and more expensive, and we would likely not have seen the huge jump in literacy across Europe at the time. Once copyrights (called “monopolies”) started to be granted they were not used to protect authors, but were weaponized as tools of censorship, suppressing works seen as subversive. Additionally, they were often granted as privileges to the landed gentry and those in favor with the ruling elite, further consolidating power and control over information and knowledge.
Some people believe that piracy, especially of scientific studies and materials that subvert harmful power structures, is not only moral - but a positive good for society, by democratizing access to information. I think that’s hard to argue with. Of course, not all piracy meets such lofty criteria, but I think it bears more examination than simply dismissing all piracy as “morally wrong”.
I’ll grant you that I may have used an overly absolute statement, and your example of the free distribution of scientific materials is a great counter-example. Maybe a better term is ‘morally grey’. The key point I wanted to make was just that in the majority of cases it is near impossible to argue that it is a ‘right’ thing to do. It’s not hard to see the more complex moral arguments sharing scientific studies, however I don’t think this really applies if we’re talking about an episode of Suits.
As for a system of ethics, to me this can be approached very simply. What would be the consequences of piracy if we all did it? At least for arts and entertainment, I don’t think there would be anything to pirate very quickly.