The amount of people that take these moral high roads is fucking ridiculous.

Well, the faceless mega-corp made it difficult to purchase or stream

I don’t like that I have to play the game on Steam

Akshually I’m just copying it, so it’s not theft

There are too many streaming services, so I shouldn’t have to pay for ANOTHER service

I’m not depriving the content creator or publisher from any money, since I wasn’t going to pay for it regardless

Just fucking own up to it. You are downloading content that you did not pay for. I don’t take some enlightened stance when I download a movie; I just do it. What I’m doing is not right, but I still do what I do. I don’t try to justify it with some bullshit political take.

We all have our line on what we deem acceptable or not. The only piracy that, in my opinion, could have a leg to stand on is when it is actual lost media. No physical copies available, no way to stream or pay for it. Anything else is just the lies we tell ourselves to justify our actions.

Just admit that you could pay for the content if you wanted to, you just choose not to, because you are a pirate. You are depriving someone somewhere from a sale or some other form of revenue.

Edit: I worded “Just own it” poorly. Clarified it to “Just own up to it”. That was the original intent, just an oversight on my part.

Capitalism itself is a scarcity based system, and it falls apart somewhat when there's abundance.

In capitalism, stuff only has value if it's scarce. We all constantly need oxygen to live, but because it's abundant, it's value is zero. Capitalism does not start valuing oxygen until there are situations where it starts becoming rare.

This works for the most part in our world because physical goods by and large are scarce, but in the situations where they aren't, capitalism doesn't work. It's the classic planned obscelesence lightbulb story, if you can make a dirt cheap light bulb that lasts forever, you'll go out of business because you've created so much abundance that after a bit of production, you're actually not needed at all anymore and raw market based capitalism has no mechanism to reward you long term.

The same is even more true for information. Unlike physical goods, information can flow and be copied freely at a fundamental physics level. To move a certain amount of physical matter a certain distance I need a certain amount of energy, and there are hard universal limits with energy density, but I can represent the number three using three galaxies, or three atoms. Information does not scale or behave the same, and is inherently abundant in the digital age.

Rather than develop a system that rewards digital artists based on how much something is used for free, we created copyright, which uses laws and DRM to create artificial scarcity for information, because then an author can be rewarded within capitalism since it's scarce.

People do it for clout or for love. Sure, the Hollywood blockbusters would cease being made but that might be an overall social good IMO.

I agree with Brian Eno who describes how, if we had a universal basic income, we would see more artists creating content just for the hell of it. He also explains how there is no "genius", there is instead what he calls "scenius" where it is an entire artistic scene which breaks new ground but only one or two happen to go viral.

This is what I do. I don't want to get burned by a shitty product.

Do I need to need to pay for the IP of your idea?

It is coming for artists to not own their own work. Taylor Swift bought back her own work, Michael Jackson bought Paul McCartney's work from the record company (which annoyed Paul because he would have done it otherwise).

Would you download a train?

When I return from the library instead of the bookstore it is with the deepest shame.

Unlike physical goods, information can flow and be copied freely at a fundamental physics level.

The electricity and silicon required to make this happen are not free, on a societal or physical level. There is a tangible cost to this transfer, even if you're ignoring the social construct of copyright.

I think this issue comes from a misunderstanding of "free", possibly conflating it for "trivially easy".

Rather than develop a system that rewards digital artists based on how much something is used for free

Feel free to come up with such a system. I think you'll find that a rather difficult task.

You have some very entitled opinions

Nah, the entitled opinions are coming from the "pay me, but you can't own media" folks.

if everyone thought like you no one would create digital media

If everyone thought like me, people could buy digital media in convenient formats at reasonable prices, and buying media would probably still be a lot more popular. My Bandcamp library is in the tens of thousands and growing. I support digital purchasing more than most, when it's done well.

but it's pretty asinine to take things without compensating the creator and claim no wrongdoing

As the whole crux of the thread makes clear, no taking is involved. You might want to go re-read the OP again, speaking of asinine.

Yes. Yesyesyesyesyes. Fuck yes.

If you aim to make significant profit with it. Yes. Otherwise i had nothing to lose to begin with.

But would you download a bus?

Depends on file size, and if the train download is done.

Yeah, me too. Especially when I only have a scale model PLA print of the car I downloaded.

This is a specious analogy. e-books from libraries are already heavily controlled and are usually quite expensive to provide. Physical copies have their own inbuilt limits to distribution.

You're treating copyright like it's some sort of hardline moral stance against consuming any media you haven't directly paid for, when actually it's more like a very long list of compromises to balance the conflicting requirements of creators' needs to be compensated for their work versus society's need to benefit from that work. This is why lending libraries, fair use etc are legal and piracy isn't.

You can tell it’s made the rounds because it has a reaction image nearly the size of the image itself shoved onto the bottom superfluously

the pirate would not have bought the copy anyways, but having free copies of the content available on the internet decreases the desire

Also, the person deciding whether or not they "would have" paid for it, has a strong incentive to kid themselves that they wouldn't. Imagine if cinemas worked that way, and you could just walk in and announce that you weren't going to buy a ticket anyway and since there's a seat over there still empty it's not going to cost them anything for you to sit in it. They'd go out of business by the end of the week.

Also also, either the thing you're copying has value that arose from the effort of creating it, or it doesn't. If it's of value, then it's reasonable to expect payment for it. It's it's not of value, then you shouldn't miss not having it.

not actually true

Not from consumption. Most of that money is for execs/investors,