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.

This is a horseshit analogy.

Stealing money from your account is theft, it's not still there afterwards.

The concept I think you might've been looking for is opportunity cost in that pirating deprives an artist of potential sales. Which is a fair point, but it is still not the same as stealing since it does not deprive the artists of their original copy.

It's also all done in the context of a system that is not run by artists and does not primarily benefit artists, but is instead run by and benefits middlemen.

Great point here.

There is absolutely a connection between how shitty corporations are treating their customers with how likely those customers are likely to stop paying and start sailing.

Netflix in its prime was the GOAT, showing a very significant decrease in piracy. We're only seeing a rise now because of the proliferation of streaming companies. No one wants to pay for 4+ streaming services.

Theft is more than just physically removing a non-fungible item. Depriving owed earnings is also considered theft, hence why piracy is considered theft because there is a debt owed for the pirated media. If you believe in wage theft, then you believe in IP theft.

hold on let me use my 50 different materials 3d printer that has to be bigger than a car to print one. or for me to learn how to make a car from its parts

Dont let them catch you with your pink pineapples or you might get in trouble:

https://patents.google.com/patent/USPP25763

Because people don't want to pay for shit content. Let's take pirating out of the equation. If I read a book I borrowed and I really like it, I would buy. If the content was trash then I wouldn't. Same goes if I watch a movie, listen to an album, or eat a microwavable burrito at a friend's or family member's house.

That assumes you were entitled to something that nobody owed you.

If the money was never yours, can you say it was stolen from you?