Cool argument, except a huge quantity of pirated works aren't "owned" by the creator or even a group that funded it, but instead by parasitic companies that abuse capitalistic tools to actually steal value from those creators.

I have thousands of purchased games. 3 categories here:

1: obtained as part of a pack (humble gog etc)

2: purchased AFTER trying out via pirate copy to know if it is my kind of thing

3: picked up early access due to demo or general interest from being a known smaller dev/studio (hare brained for example)

With less and less access to shareware and viable demos, piracy is often the only conduit to prevent me getting ripped off of $80 for something that looks like a shiny sports car but end up being another "buy $800 in dlc for the full story!" Ford pinto.

Additionally, I now flat refuse to fund the likes of Denuvo, and wish that piracy actively hurt the bottom line of companies deploying that kind of anti-user shit.

Ditto on Spotify. I have big love for piracy of FLAC for my personal music server, but I also have a decent rack filled with physical offerings from my favorite bands.

My Bandcamp collection is also getting up there, since a few of my favs say they are treated well there, and it's FLAC friendly as well.

Physical media or merch directly from the band is absolutely the way to go every time if possible.

Isn't it more akin to stealing money though? Or to be more precise stealing the potential of money since not everyone who pirates would ever have paid for it on the first place.

Hey man, you can't park that here

I'm having trouble finding a link to substantiate it, but I remember in the early 2000's a group of artists having to sue their record labels because of the lawsuits on file-sharing users. The record labels said they were doing it for the artists, but the artists had to sue the record labels to even ever see a penny from the fruits of those lawsuits. The record labels were just pocketing the money for themselves while saying it was "for the artists."

Anyway, long story short is that kind of behavior from the recording industry made me want to give money directly to the artists and cut out these selfish middlemen who did nothing but claimed all the profits.

I guess herein lies the potential fallacy of my statement.
Decreased desire is a Subjective observation.

One cannot draw a direct correlation, but there is data to conclude that not having a piracy option will boost sales of data initially, at least when it comes to games. (Hence why publishers continue to use Denuvo)

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/10/the-true-cost-of-game-piracy-20-percent-of-revenue-according-to-a-new-study/

Ironically, piracy develops more ethical consumers

Now make the exact same meme but substitute "AI training" for "piracy" and watch the downvotes flow in.

Counterpoint: When Louis CK (prior to being outed as a sex pest) released one of his comedy specials on his website DRM-free for $5 he became a millionaire almost overnight.

https://boingboing.net/2011/12/22/drm-free-experiment-makes-loui.html

Price point matters, too.

It also jives with early Steam Sales when Valve would cut titles like Left 4 Dead Counter Strike down to 90% off, and they would sell so many digital copies that they were actually making more money off the lower price.

https://www.geekwire.com/2011/experiments-video-game-economics-valves-gabe-newell/

Now we did something where we decided to look at price elasticity. Without making announcements, we varied the price of one of our products. We have Steam so we can watch user behavior in real time. That gives us a useful tool for making experiments which you can’t really do through a lot of other distribution mechanisms. What we saw was that pricing was perfectly elastic. In other words, our gross revenue would remain constant. We thought, hooray, we understand this really well. There’s no way to use price to increase or decrease the size of your business.

But then we did this different experiment where we did a sale. The sale is a highly promoted event that has ancillary media like comic books and movies associated with it. We do a 75 percent price reduction, our Counter-Strike experience tells us that our gross revenue would remain constant. Instead what we saw was our gross revenue increased by a factor of 40. Not 40 percent, but a factor of 40. Which is completely not predicted by our previous experience with silent price variation. …

Then we decided that all we were really doing was time-shifting revenue. We were moving sales forward from the future. Then when we analyzed that we saw two things that were very surprising. Promotions on the digital channel increased sales at retail at the same time, and increased sales after the sale was finished, which falsified the temporal shifting and channel cannibalization arguments. Essentially, your audience, the people who bought the game, were more effective than traditional promotional tools. So we tried a third-party product to see if we had some artificial home-field advantage. We saw the same pricing phenomenon. Twenty-five percent, 50 percent and 75 percent very reliably generate different increases in gross revenue.

tbf I did do this a week ago and nobody downdooted me https://lemmy.uhhoh.com/comment/11886692

Piracy is making a child share toys with the kid who has none.

I for one would definitely download a car, if I did not already own one I really like.

I'd happily let's others download mine, if it didn't affect me or my car in any way.

Holy fuck this meme is so old it's probably of legal age to drink

This logic does no justice to the objective financial harm being done to the creators/owners of valuable data/content/media.

It does though, since no harm is being done.

The original creator/owner is at a loss when data is copied. The intent of that data is to be copied for profit. Now that the data has been copied against the creator/owners will, they do not receive the profit from that copy.

They also don't receive profit from not copying, unless there's a purchase made. By your logic, watching something on Netflix or listening to it on the radio is actively harmful to creators, which I think most people can admit is absurd.

but having free copies of the content available on the internet decreases the desire for people to obtain paid copies of the data.

You made this assertion, but don't really back it up. If you were correct here, being able to copy cassette tapes or burn cds would have killed the music industry decades ago. Piracy is the original grassroots promotional method.

At the very least it gives people an option not to pay for the data, which is not what the creator wanted in creating it.

That's a separate argument and doesn't relate at all to the supposed financial harm.

They are entitled to fair compensation to their work.

That's a loaded assertion. If I sing a song right now, what am I entitled to be paid for it? And you're ignoring that most of the "work" of being a musician (in most genres at least) is playing live performances, the experience of which cannot be pirated.

It is true that pirating is not directly theft, but it does definitely take away from the creator's/distributor's profit.

I don't think it's definite at all. Most of what musicians make these days is from merch and ticket sales, which piracy contributes to by bringing in new fans.

Surely you’re not saying that record labels are dishonest?!

A lot of people used to pirate food, but as our housing was pushed from houses to apartments, they took that freedom from us. If you still live in a house, you can still pirate a lot of food in your yard.

I am 100% down for sailing the high seas. But let's not sugarcoat it, this analogy is always been kind of crap.

Somebody went to your mailbox took out your paycheck, made a copy of it, put the original back in your box, went to the bank and cashed it.

Theft still took place. You're probably still getting paid. Maybe it got taken up by insurance and everyone's premium goes up a tiny fraction, maybe it got taken up by the bank or by your business.

It's still an incomplete analogy but it's a little bit closer.

That's not to say that the vast majority of piracy isn't people who wouldn't pay anyway. And back in the day, you certainly got more visibility in your games from people who were pirating.

But now that advertising is on its toes and steam exists, I won't think they're getting any serious benefit from piracy and I don't think that they're not losing At least modest numbers of sales.

Corporations profiting from copyright laws they helped write deserve to have their profits stolen in any case. Not gonna lose any sleep over it.

Piracy is somewhat similar to vigilantism to me. My ability to consider it a negative is directly related to how fair I consider the legitimate methods available to be.

If similar efforts were focused on consumer protection laws as we do IP protection, I don't think pirates would have much leg to stand on, and they'd be seen in more of a negative light.

But since consumers are regularly fucked by corporations, all I see is two sides both doing bad shit and I'm not feeling all that charitable for the faceless megacorp. I also dislike pirates who pirate from small time creators. But that's about as far as I can care given the state of things.

We should be focusing on stronger consumer rights to truly fix the problem for all sides.

I am 100% down for sailing the high seas. But let's not sugarcoat it, this analogy is always been kind of crap.

It's less an analogy than the literal legal definition of theft.

Somebody went to your mailbox took out your paycheck, made a copy of it, put the original back in your box, went to the bank and cashed it.

This analogy is crap. When they took your paycheck, that was theft. Even if temporarily, you didn't have the check. If they cash the fraudulent check, they're not copying the money; it's coming out of your account. That's also theft. Both cases, the original is being removed, whether it be the physical check or the money from your account. The only reason there might be a "copy" in your analogy is some sort of fraud protection by the bank, at which point it's the bank's money getting stolen. Still theft though.