5 ms·

Serious question about torrents: How is this not stealing? I'm not trying to be judgemental. I certainly don't have any room to do so as I used Napster and the

by awicz 7y ago

Serious question about torrents: How is this not stealing? I'm not trying to be judgemental. I certainly don't have any room to do so as I used Napster and the likes back in the day. Now with the advent of Amazon Prime, Hulu, Netflix, etc, I'm genuinely curious to know the moral argument for using services and platforms that utilize torrents to distribute media other creators are actually trying to sell? Edit: Apparently this question has upset a good number of people. It was a genuine inquiry. It would have been nice to see your thoughts in written form instead of the downvotes. To those that did answer--thanks! Really incredible how complicated the licensing arrangements are across the world.

sz4kerto 7y ago
For example, here (in Hungary) we are paying some extra 'contribution' whenever we buy storage (HDDs, SSDs, SD cards, USB sticks) that is intended to compensate artists and distributors for lost revenue because the assumption is that we'll likely store pirated stuff on them. Therefore downloading is not illegal here (sharing is, which kind of puts torrents into a strange place). The world is a bit crazy, isn't it.
- awicz 7y ago
  Wow. That is an interesting model! Do you know how they determine how the funds are distributed?
  - sz4kerto 7y ago
    Yes. Almost no money is given to the artists, most of it is eaten by the organization that claims to be representing them and has good political connections.
  - scandinavegan 7y ago
    Sweden has the same system. You can read more about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy The collected money is in general handed out by Copyswede [1], but for music it's handled by STIM [2]. STIM also supposedly handles paying money to artists played for customers at the barber, and all these special cases, and music played on TV, and so on. I don't know for sure, but I think that the money is divided based on official sales data, so the artists who sell most also gets most of the "cassette tax" as it is known, because it was introduced as an added tax on cassettes back in the 80s. It is not popular with consumers, since you have to pay extra for blank CDs, DVDs, USB sticks, and hard drives even if you don't use them to copy music. The tax is not to cover loss of income due to piracy, I just learned from the Wikipedia page, but to enable private copying of music without having to buy extra copies from the producer. As I said, since you have to pay even if you use the CD as a Linux boot disc, it's not very popular with the public, but a lot of people don't even know about it. [1] https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyswede https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyswede (in Swedish) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIM (in English)
- lubonay 7y ago
  What happened to "innocent until proven guilty"? That's just a fine where they assume you'd pirate stuff in the future!
  - JeanMarcS 7y ago
    It can be even more stupid than that. In France, where we have same sort of law, you have to pay it also if you are a business... You can get the tax back, but you have to jump through a lot of hoop holes, and so not a lot of business do it. It’s purely racket.
- whatch 7y ago
  Same in Russia. But they tax not only storage but basically everything that can play music and/or video including desktops, laptops, tablets and phones.
phito 7y ago
The problem is that shows/movies are spread all over these platforms, or are not even available on them. I'm happy to pay my Netflix subscription each months, but if a show I want to watch is not on it, I will pirate it. I'm not going to pay for multiple video streaming services each months.
- brewdad 7y ago
  It gets really frustrating when one service has seasons 1-3 of a show but I need to subscribe to another service to get seasons 4 and 5. I've even seen the case where season 1 and 3 are on a service but season 2 is somewhere else. Add in the fact that these deals change all the time so season 3 might be somewhere else by the time I'm caught up and ready to watch it and the whole system is madness.
intertractor 7y ago
"I'm genuinely curious to know the moral argument..." Nobody cares.
fartcannon 7y ago
I also don't think there's a justification for using it, however it's not stealing, it's copyright infringement. Additionally, the loss is not one to one. Each pirated video does not equate to a lost sale. The fact that people imply that is ludicrous. Man, I haven't said that stuff in like 20 years. Takes me back to naptser day. Now someone ask me if I would download a car!
- close04 7y ago
  Sometimes as a legal user you are faced with far more obstacles than the illegal user. All kinds of limitations that are made to curb piracy but actually just hurt legitimate users. This applies to every type of protected content, be it music, video, games, ebooks, etc. This makes paying users less likely to sympathize with the content provider. And then you see those transparent attempts to skew numbers so they can generate some compassion ("This episode of GoT was pirated 30 million times which means we lost 30 million possible subscribers!!11" type thing) and you start having a really bad impression about them whether you pay for the service o not. I am forced to torrent content that I already legally pay for just to get a proper subtitle or voice over for example, because sometimes I get a different experience for the same content based on the country I'm in.
  - spottybanana 7y ago
    Also as a legal user you might end up paying for subscription service you don't use. I'm subscribed to netflix and HBO and don't remember the last time when I used them... Now and then try to find something to watch but it is all shit.
    - bjelkeman-again 7y ago
      Which is why we unsubscribed recently and read more books and play free or donation based games instead.
    - close04 7y ago
      But that's a straight forward fix: unsubscribe. The problem is when all the legal options are real PITAs.
q3k 7y ago
We were fine for a while. Netflix killed film/series piracy for me - for a while it literally made no sense. Then, every copyright owner realized they want a slice of the streaming cake - (HBO, Disney+, all the cable networks...) and started making their content exclusive on their platforms. Now, instead of a single Netflix (or anyone else, really) subscription I would have to pay for a dozen, that I would rarely use for more than one series/film. Or I can't even get it at all, because it's not available in my country. Or only available with subtitles in a language I don't understand. Or I can't watch it on the hardware I want to. The music industry got their shit together and even the most copyright-paranoid artists are on Spotify, or on Bandcamp (which is subscription-free). When the film industry does the same I'll gladly start paying them money again.
- deanstag 7y ago
  In that case, what is the maximum amount of subscription fee that you are willing to shell out before resorting to piracy?
  - Dirlewanger 7y ago
    You already know that answer is going to be different for everyone, so I don't know why you bother asking it. A better question is when are film studios going to stop profiteering with their license fees and allow their works to be available on any platform (instead of meticulously negotiating with one platform and moving around every couple months).
    - deanstag 7y ago
      The question opens up other questions exactly like you mentioned. For eg: If it was never about the price point, and more about it being available on a single platform, would you be fine with paying a very high subscription fee for a platform which holds all the catalogues? Let me be clear, I torrent things too, but I've never really had an answer to the piracy question. I wouldnt just want to blame it on all the studios seperating out the catalogues into their own service.
lubonay 7y ago
You can't find everything on streaming services, actually. Sometimes your only hope is to find a torrent and make a "back-up".
mab122 7y ago
Honestly I don't have moral problem with downloading movies that are forgotten/not available by any other means.
vslira 7y ago
I don't pirate, nowadays mostly because I already have a couple of subscriptions and not enough time to consume all the content I already can. But for me the answer is fairly obvious: availability. If video content was as convenient to consume as music, then pirating wouldn't be making a comeback. You can subscribe to all major streaming services and it's likely you won't find a given niche tv series or cult movie, unlike with music that with a single spotify sub you can listen to basically any formally published album (Ok, I know it's not strictly true, but it's closer to this state than with video)
mbanzi 7y ago
I don't use torrents etc but to give you a customer perspective: Because of the proliferation of services and the lock-in each one of them is trying to promote, if you want to follow your favourite shows you would have to subscribe to all of them and it becomes expensive very quickly. As an European there is always the problem that some great shows that are available in the US might not be available in your country. To make mattter worse, if you're in switzerland like me you might have the option to watch a show only in German (which I don't speak) and they don't even give you access to the original english soundtrack. Faced with all these annoyances, I canceled them all. If they don't care about the customer experience I don't care about them. I use a (legal) service which allows me to watch on demand any TV show broadcast from most of European TVs in the last 7 days. It works well, it's cheap and most shows have they original english soundtrack. Some other people use torrents or dodgey streaming websites.
- aargh_aargh 7y ago
  Which service do you use?
a_imho 7y ago
https://stallman.org/articles/end-war-on-sharing.html https://stallman.org/articles/end-war-on-sharing.html
KMnO4 7y ago
The argument for piracy is always a mix between those who aren’t willing to pay for the media, and those who aren’t willing to put up with the limitations and restrictions of DRM. Sometimes you can compromise with one side if the other is really good. Spotify is a good example, where it really is more convenient to pay $10 for every song you could ever think of. On the other hand, there’s no similar buffet-style movie service that has more than 10% of the movies I want to watch. It’s hard for someone to justify paying $60/month on the four streaming services (since the market is so fragmented) and still not able to watch Iron Man 2 (though 1 and 3 are there)
sksksk 7y ago
To me, stealing implies depriving someone of something. If I take your car, you don't have a car anymore. If I make a copy of your movie, you still have that movie. Arguably, you're being deprived of the money from the sale of the movie, but there are already other terms that can be used (piracy, copyright infringement).
- clarry 7y ago
  > Arguably, you're being deprived of the money from the sale of the movie And that's only wishy washy wish-I-had-money, nothing real. (And even that isn't really the case since sale and piracy are not mutually exclusive)
tuyiown 7y ago
You have to separate morality and legal technicalities to answer this properly. For the legal part, stealing is for physical objects, eg. the victim doesn't have disposal of this stolen good anymore. This is not true for intellectual «property» since it's a copy. This is why copyright & copyright infringement has been created, whose original purpose was to protect authors from publisher and protect publishers that made advances to authors from other publishers. For the moral part, you have no clear answer, circulation of free copies obviously reduces revenues of authors, but also it allows access of content to people that wouldn't have paid for it anyways, case where the loss of revenue is shaky. To extend further, it's related to consumer frustration, while it's no question that being frustrated if you don't own a Ferrai is frivolous, if you can't afford it, you have to steal it from someone, the frustration occurred for copyright content is solely based on publisher/distributor strategy on maximizing revenue. The thing is, total revenue has a, albeit unknown, maximum theoretical possible, hence after a trigger frustration left is purely and solely a strategy to protect revenue. In the end, you get frustrated people just to have copyright holders a better peace of mind and revenue, and nothing else, so there's a moral balance to keep that you can't reduce to a black and white situation.
esarbe 7y ago
"Stealing" is taking something from someone. This is not stealing because you are not taking anything from anyone. You could called it "unlicensed copying" if you want, that's legally sound.
throwaway9d0291 7y ago
For me the argument is and has basically always been availability. I don't live in the United States and if I want to watch say Westworld, even though it's airing on the national broadcaster for free, it only does so in French, which I don't understand. There's nowhere I can legally watch the English version so my only option is piracy. In other cases it's because the market is fragmented. Were I still living in the US, I'd happily pay $20/mo for a Netflix subscription (and do) but I wouldn't pay $10/m for each of Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, Disney Plus, HBO for American stuff plus another $10/mo for each anime streaming service that has an exclusive.
p2t2p 7y ago
Recently I torrented this nice little piece of art: https://www.discogs.com/Django-Reinhardt-Djangologie-1928-1950/release/4259143 https://www.discogs.com/Django-Reinhardt-Djangologie-1928-19.... Now, good luck finding where to buy it =). (I did try) Spotify doesn't have even half of my collection of Johnny Horton (which I torrented as well). Also, I'm afraid of censorship. Some of the early 20th century county singers we throwing n-words left right and center and you won't find them on Spotify. Same for Apple Music. With Apple Music it even worse. Music disappears from the library _suddenly_. Just because same shady firm has it's license expired in Australia. Internet is full of stories of people who were unable to re-download movies or music form iTunes because the right owner has deleted it from the store. No, no money back. So the only place where I pay for music is Bandcamp, which lets you download the stuff you paid for, right here, right now in variety of formats including lossless.
arkh 7y ago
Better ease of use: I'm in France, I don't know what service has what or for how much time. Most French services will tend to propose dubbed version only, or not let me remove subtitles if I don't need them. With torrents I get access to everything on one application, with the audio and subtitle settings I want. Also I have a shitty connection so if I want good quality streaming is no-no: so I download and watch once it's done and when I want. Edit: and for the moral part, most Hollywood people preach for communism. So let them show the way.
mping 7y ago
Of course it is. Stealing is taking what is not given. People can play with words and logic all day but that's it. If you take something that was not given to you it's stealing. In case of torrents, the owner of the media obviously didn't sell it nor gave it.
aaaa324234 7y ago
Most likely the most legitimate reason is archiving. Streaming services often offer very poor quality for even 3 year old shows that make them look like they are from 10 years ago. Meanwhile shows from the 80s look much better as long as they are torrented.
ta1235235 7y ago
When you steal from someone, you take something that belongs to them. If someone steals your bike, you don't have a bike anymore. When you torrent, you create a _copy_ of your friends _copy_. your friend still has his copy, but now you have a copy too. Hope that helps
beatgammit 7y ago
Legally, it is stealing. However, just because something is illegal doesn't make it wrong. However, you could also think of it like the digital equivalent of sharing. If someone purchases a movie or TV series on physical disks, they could loan it to you without breaking the law. In fact, they could even make a copy of the disk and not break the law. The only way to break the law this way is by having multiple copies in use at the same time. This is just digital sharing without checks in place to make sure multiple copies of the content aren't used simultaneously. That being said, who is really harmed when I give someone a copy for free? I'm not stealing from the content creator (I paid, after all), and I'm not selling it, and there's no guarantee that the person I gave it to would have purchased it. If the creator hasn't lost anything and I'm not taking credit for it, nobody was harmed. In my eyes, this makes piracy acceptable as long as I don't sell it. If we didn't have such strong copyright protections, content creators would be forced to compete with piracy by offering convenience, but instead they sue. Netflix has proven to reduce piracy because they offer convenience, but that only works for content they can provide.
- josho 7y ago
  > Legally, it is stealing No it isn't. If I steal your bike you no longer have a bike. You no longer have the benefits of using it for transportation, society is worse off. As you explained copyright is very different from that. So, let's not call these 2 different things the same.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
belorn 7y ago
A genuine inquiry should get a genuine answer. Let me try to provide one. Copyright law with its duration of 95 years after the authors death is practically universally seen as the result of money being transfer from large companies into the control of politicians that voted in favor of the law. Normally when laws get written as the result of money changing hand we call it corruption, but as the supreme court have show, that is not always so. Some people have tried to fix the problem from within, but the US political system makes third-party initiatives like that rather hard. Internationally, the result of the corrupt process spread through international trade agreements where nations has to either implement the same laws or risk getting trade sanctions from the US, and thus internationally nations has accepted the same corrupt law in exchange for getting through trade deals. There is no moral ground for following current copyright law except blind following. Instead what we get is individual moral decisions where for example a person might feel it being acceptable to view 95 minus 1 year after the authors death old video on youtube, but find it wrong to view a recently released cinematic movie. Each person uniquely define when, where and how they feel copyrights exclusive monopoly is morally defensible and when it is not. The result is that you get about as many different moral view on the issue as there is people.
cjg 7y ago
It isn't stealing. After you torrent something, someone else doesn't have less. It also isn't treated as stealing by (most countries'?) legal frameworks. It's copyright infringement - and not even commercial infringement (where you are making money by infringing). Non-commercial copyright infringement isn't even criminal - it's a civil matter.

by awicz 7y ago

sz4kerto 7y ago

For example, here (in Hungary) we are paying some extra 'contribution' whenever we buy storage (HDDs, SSDs, SD cards, USB sticks) that is intended to compensate artists and distributors for lost revenue because the assumption is that we'll likely store pirated stuff on them. Therefore downloading is not illegal here (sharing is, which kind of puts torrents into a strange place). The world is a bit crazy, isn't it.

awicz 7y ago
Wow. That is an interesting model! Do you know how they determine how the funds are distributed?
- sz4kerto 7y ago
  Yes. Almost no money is given to the artists, most of it is eaten by the organization that claims to be representing them and has good political connections.
- scandinavegan 7y ago
  Sweden has the same system. You can read more about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy The collected money is in general handed out by Copyswede [1], but for music it's handled by STIM [2]. STIM also supposedly handles paying money to artists played for customers at the barber, and all these special cases, and music played on TV, and so on. I don't know for sure, but I think that the money is divided based on official sales data, so the artists who sell most also gets most of the "cassette tax" as it is known, because it was introduced as an added tax on cassettes back in the 80s. It is not popular with consumers, since you have to pay extra for blank CDs, DVDs, USB sticks, and hard drives even if you don't use them to copy music. The tax is not to cover loss of income due to piracy, I just learned from the Wikipedia page, but to enable private copying of music without having to buy extra copies from the producer. As I said, since you have to pay even if you use the CD as a Linux boot disc, it's not very popular with the public, but a lot of people don't even know about it. [1] https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyswede https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyswede (in Swedish) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIM (in English)
lubonay 7y ago
What happened to "innocent until proven guilty"? That's just a fine where they assume you'd pirate stuff in the future!
- JeanMarcS 7y ago
  It can be even more stupid than that. In France, where we have same sort of law, you have to pay it also if you are a business... You can get the tax back, but you have to jump through a lot of hoop holes, and so not a lot of business do it. It’s purely racket.
whatch 7y ago
Same in Russia. But they tax not only storage but basically everything that can play music and/or video including desktops, laptops, tablets and phones.

phito 7y ago

The problem is that shows/movies are spread all over these platforms, or are not even available on them. I'm happy to pay my Netflix subscription each months, but if a show I want to watch is not on it, I will pirate it. I'm not going to pay for multiple video streaming services each months.

brewdad 7y ago
It gets really frustrating when one service has seasons 1-3 of a show but I need to subscribe to another service to get seasons 4 and 5. I've even seen the case where season 1 and 3 are on a service but season 2 is somewhere else. Add in the fact that these deals change all the time so season 3 might be somewhere else by the time I'm caught up and ready to watch it and the whole system is madness.

intertractor 7y ago

"I'm genuinely curious to know the moral argument..." Nobody cares.

fartcannon 7y ago

I also don't think there's a justification for using it, however it's not stealing, it's copyright infringement. Additionally, the loss is not one to one. Each pirated video does not equate to a lost sale. The fact that people imply that is ludicrous. Man, I haven't said that stuff in like 20 years. Takes me back to naptser day. Now someone ask me if I would download a car!

close04 7y ago
Sometimes as a legal user you are faced with far more obstacles than the illegal user. All kinds of limitations that are made to curb piracy but actually just hurt legitimate users. This applies to every type of protected content, be it music, video, games, ebooks, etc. This makes paying users less likely to sympathize with the content provider. And then you see those transparent attempts to skew numbers so they can generate some compassion ("This episode of GoT was pirated 30 million times which means we lost 30 million possible subscribers!!11" type thing) and you start having a really bad impression about them whether you pay for the service o not. I am forced to torrent content that I already legally pay for just to get a proper subtitle or voice over for example, because sometimes I get a different experience for the same content based on the country I'm in.
- spottybanana 7y ago
  Also as a legal user you might end up paying for subscription service you don't use. I'm subscribed to netflix and HBO and don't remember the last time when I used them... Now and then try to find something to watch but it is all shit.
  - bjelkeman-again 7y ago
    Which is why we unsubscribed recently and read more books and play free or donation based games instead.
  - close04 7y ago
    But that's a straight forward fix: unsubscribe. The problem is when all the legal options are real PITAs.

q3k 7y ago

We were fine for a while. Netflix killed film/series piracy for me - for a while it literally made no sense. Then, every copyright owner realized they want a slice of the streaming cake - (HBO, Disney+, all the cable networks...) and started making their content exclusive on their platforms. Now, instead of a single Netflix (or anyone else, really) subscription I would have to pay for a dozen, that I would rarely use for more than one series/film. Or I can't even get it at all, because it's not available in my country. Or only available with subtitles in a language I don't understand. Or I can't watch it on the hardware I want to. The music industry got their shit together and even the most copyright-paranoid artists are on Spotify, or on Bandcamp (which is subscription-free). When the film industry does the same I'll gladly start paying them money again.

deanstag 7y ago
In that case, what is the maximum amount of subscription fee that you are willing to shell out before resorting to piracy?
- Dirlewanger 7y ago
  You already know that answer is going to be different for everyone, so I don't know why you bother asking it. A better question is when are film studios going to stop profiteering with their license fees and allow their works to be available on any platform (instead of meticulously negotiating with one platform and moving around every couple months).
  - deanstag 7y ago
    The question opens up other questions exactly like you mentioned. For eg: If it was never about the price point, and more about it being available on a single platform, would you be fine with paying a very high subscription fee for a platform which holds all the catalogues? Let me be clear, I torrent things too, but I've never really had an answer to the piracy question. I wouldnt just want to blame it on all the studios seperating out the catalogues into their own service.

lubonay 7y ago

You can't find everything on streaming services, actually. Sometimes your only hope is to find a torrent and make a "back-up".

mab122 7y ago

Honestly I don't have moral problem with downloading movies that are forgotten/not available by any other means.

vslira 7y ago

I don't pirate, nowadays mostly because I already have a couple of subscriptions and not enough time to consume all the content I already can. But for me the answer is fairly obvious: availability. If video content was as convenient to consume as music, then pirating wouldn't be making a comeback. You can subscribe to all major streaming services and it's likely you won't find a given niche tv series or cult movie, unlike with music that with a single spotify sub you can listen to basically any formally published album (Ok, I know it's not strictly true, but it's closer to this state than with video)

mbanzi 7y ago

I don't use torrents etc but to give you a customer perspective: Because of the proliferation of services and the lock-in each one of them is trying to promote, if you want to follow your favourite shows you would have to subscribe to all of them and it becomes expensive very quickly. As an European there is always the problem that some great shows that are available in the US might not be available in your country. To make mattter worse, if you're in switzerland like me you might have the option to watch a show only in German (which I don't speak) and they don't even give you access to the original english soundtrack. Faced with all these annoyances, I canceled them all. If they don't care about the customer experience I don't care about them. I use a (legal) service which allows me to watch on demand any TV show broadcast from most of European TVs in the last 7 days. It works well, it's cheap and most shows have they original english soundtrack. Some other people use torrents or dodgey streaming websites.

aargh_aargh 7y ago
Which service do you use?

a_imho 7y ago

https://stallman.org/articles/end-war-on-sharing.html https://stallman.org/articles/end-war-on-sharing.html

KMnO4 7y ago

The argument for piracy is always a mix between those who aren’t willing to pay for the media, and those who aren’t willing to put up with the limitations and restrictions of DRM. Sometimes you can compromise with one side if the other is really good. Spotify is a good example, where it really is more convenient to pay $10 for every song you could ever think of. On the other hand, there’s no similar buffet-style movie service that has more than 10% of the movies I want to watch. It’s hard for someone to justify paying $60/month on the four streaming services (since the market is so fragmented) and still not able to watch Iron Man 2 (though 1 and 3 are there)

sksksk 7y ago

To me, stealing implies depriving someone of something. If I take your car, you don't have a car anymore. If I make a copy of your movie, you still have that movie. Arguably, you're being deprived of the money from the sale of the movie, but there are already other terms that can be used (piracy, copyright infringement).

clarry 7y ago
> Arguably, you're being deprived of the money from the sale of the movie And that's only wishy washy wish-I-had-money, nothing real. (And even that isn't really the case since sale and piracy are not mutually exclusive)

tuyiown 7y ago

You have to separate morality and legal technicalities to answer this properly. For the legal part, stealing is for physical objects, eg. the victim doesn't have disposal of this stolen good anymore. This is not true for intellectual «property» since it's a copy. This is why copyright & copyright infringement has been created, whose original purpose was to protect authors from publisher and protect publishers that made advances to authors from other publishers. For the moral part, you have no clear answer, circulation of free copies obviously reduces revenues of authors, but also it allows access of content to people that wouldn't have paid for it anyways, case where the loss of revenue is shaky. To extend further, it's related to consumer frustration, while it's no question that being frustrated if you don't own a Ferrai is frivolous, if you can't afford it, you have to steal it from someone, the frustration occurred for copyright content is solely based on publisher/distributor strategy on maximizing revenue. The thing is, total revenue has a, albeit unknown, maximum theoretical possible, hence after a trigger frustration left is purely and solely a strategy to protect revenue. In the end, you get frustrated people just to have copyright holders a better peace of mind and revenue, and nothing else, so there's a moral balance to keep that you can't reduce to a black and white situation.

esarbe 7y ago

"Stealing" is taking something from someone. This is not stealing because you are not taking anything from anyone. You could called it "unlicensed copying" if you want, that's legally sound.

throwaway9d0291 7y ago

For me the argument is and has basically always been availability. I don't live in the United States and if I want to watch say Westworld, even though it's airing on the national broadcaster for free, it only does so in French, which I don't understand. There's nowhere I can legally watch the English version so my only option is piracy. In other cases it's because the market is fragmented. Were I still living in the US, I'd happily pay $20/mo for a Netflix subscription (and do) but I wouldn't pay $10/m for each of Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, Disney Plus, HBO for American stuff plus another $10/mo for each anime streaming service that has an exclusive.

p2t2p 7y ago

Recently I torrented this nice little piece of art: https://www.discogs.com/Django-Reinhardt-Djangologie-1928-1950/release/4259143 https://www.discogs.com/Django-Reinhardt-Djangologie-1928-19.... Now, good luck finding where to buy it =). (I did try) Spotify doesn't have even half of my collection of Johnny Horton (which I torrented as well). Also, I'm afraid of censorship. Some of the early 20th century county singers we throwing n-words left right and center and you won't find them on Spotify. Same for Apple Music. With Apple Music it even worse. Music disappears from the library _suddenly_. Just because same shady firm has it's license expired in Australia. Internet is full of stories of people who were unable to re-download movies or music form iTunes because the right owner has deleted it from the store. No, no money back. So the only place where I pay for music is Bandcamp, which lets you download the stuff you paid for, right here, right now in variety of formats including lossless.

arkh 7y ago

Better ease of use: I'm in France, I don't know what service has what or for how much time. Most French services will tend to propose dubbed version only, or not let me remove subtitles if I don't need them. With torrents I get access to everything on one application, with the audio and subtitle settings I want. Also I have a shitty connection so if I want good quality streaming is no-no: so I download and watch once it's done and when I want. Edit: and for the moral part, most Hollywood people preach for communism. So let them show the way.

mping 7y ago

Of course it is. Stealing is taking what is not given. People can play with words and logic all day but that's it. If you take something that was not given to you it's stealing. In case of torrents, the owner of the media obviously didn't sell it nor gave it.

aaaa324234 7y ago

Most likely the most legitimate reason is archiving. Streaming services often offer very poor quality for even 3 year old shows that make them look like they are from 10 years ago. Meanwhile shows from the 80s look much better as long as they are torrented.

ta1235235 7y ago

When you steal from someone, you take something that belongs to them. If someone steals your bike, you don't have a bike anymore. When you torrent, you create a _copy_ of your friends _copy_. your friend still has his copy, but now you have a copy too. Hope that helps

beatgammit 7y ago

Legally, it is stealing. However, just because something is illegal doesn't make it wrong. However, you could also think of it like the digital equivalent of sharing. If someone purchases a movie or TV series on physical disks, they could loan it to you without breaking the law. In fact, they could even make a copy of the disk and not break the law. The only way to break the law this way is by having multiple copies in use at the same time. This is just digital sharing without checks in place to make sure multiple copies of the content aren't used simultaneously. That being said, who is really harmed when I give someone a copy for free? I'm not stealing from the content creator (I paid, after all), and I'm not selling it, and there's no guarantee that the person I gave it to would have purchased it. If the creator hasn't lost anything and I'm not taking credit for it, nobody was harmed. In my eyes, this makes piracy acceptable as long as I don't sell it. If we didn't have such strong copyright protections, content creators would be forced to compete with piracy by offering convenience, but instead they sue. Netflix has proven to reduce piracy because they offer convenience, but that only works for content they can provide.

josho 7y ago
> Legally, it is stealing No it isn't. If I steal your bike you no longer have a bike. You no longer have the benefits of using it for transportation, society is worse off. As you explained copyright is very different from that. So, let's not call these 2 different things the same.
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belorn 7y ago

A genuine inquiry should get a genuine answer. Let me try to provide one. Copyright law with its duration of 95 years after the authors death is practically universally seen as the result of money being transfer from large companies into the control of politicians that voted in favor of the law. Normally when laws get written as the result of money changing hand we call it corruption, but as the supreme court have show, that is not always so. Some people have tried to fix the problem from within, but the US political system makes third-party initiatives like that rather hard. Internationally, the result of the corrupt process spread through international trade agreements where nations has to either implement the same laws or risk getting trade sanctions from the US, and thus internationally nations has accepted the same corrupt law in exchange for getting through trade deals. There is no moral ground for following current copyright law except blind following. Instead what we get is individual moral decisions where for example a person might feel it being acceptable to view 95 minus 1 year after the authors death old video on youtube, but find it wrong to view a recently released cinematic movie. Each person uniquely define when, where and how they feel copyrights exclusive monopoly is morally defensible and when it is not. The result is that you get about as many different moral view on the issue as there is people.

cjg 7y ago

It isn't stealing. After you torrent something, someone else doesn't have less. It also isn't treated as stealing by (most countries'?) legal frameworks. It's copyright infringement - and not even commercial infringement (where you are making money by infringing). Non-commercial copyright infringement isn't even criminal - it's a civil matter.