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I wonder whether people who defend piracy also defend making money with it. That tends to be where I draw the line (except for perhaps very extenuating circums

I wonder whether people who defend piracy also defend making money with it. That tends to be where I draw the line (except for perhaps very extenuating circumstances). For me, piracy without profit motive is literally just knowledge / information sharing. I feel as though copyright basically shouldn't exist in cases where someone doesn't profit from reproducing / copying / distributing some kind of content. As soon as someone starts making money with someone else's creation, it becomes a crime in my view. I understand that there is nuance to this...what if someone runs a torrent site and needs funding to keep running the site, thus technically creating some kind of cash-flow / revenue stream. I don't really have the answer to that (except perhaps that we should all just use open-source DHT-based torrent searches, so no funding of centralised sites is needed?) But yeah, in cases where someone is this blatantly operating an IPTV service, it's obvious why they got prosecuted.

wil421 3y ago
I’ve felt the same since the time of CD burners. If someone gave me a blank disc I would burn whatever mix tape they wanted. There were kids charging $10-$15 per custom mix but I always thought it was not cool. Then when I saw one of the teen girls on trial for MP3 sharing I decided to keep everything for my self. Pay for Plex schemes are similar to the CD selling of the 2000s.
api 3y ago
My opinion on the whole subject of piracy has changed really radically since I was younger. I'm not really a fan of it at all, even without making money, and with making money I think it's definitely not a good thing. The thing that really changed my mind was realizing that the phrase "information wants to be free" just means "intellectual labor will be free." In other words a world where there is no copyright and piracy is standard would be one in which no form of intellectual labor can be compensated. In an economy that is increasingly dematerialized, this is a recipe for extreme wealth disparity and a return to feudalism. Only the owners of physical property would have any ability to earn anything outside service labor. You'd have landlords, large capital-owning corporations, banks, and low-paid no-upward-mobility service jobs. In other words I started to see piracy as an assault on the middle class, almost a tool to bust wages and disempower labor. It also incentivizes locking everything up in the cloud. You can't pirate things if you never have them. Some of this may happen without piracy, but piracy makes it virtually impossible to run a business in any other way. It makes businesses that give you access to data or empower you to run your own software impossible. P.S. The worst form of piracy is the kind that is perpetuated by gigantic corporations. IMHO a lot of the AI revolution is being powered by huge scale piracy. AI is cool but the people providing the training data need to be compensated, especially if their stuff is used to train models that are paywalled and never released. Don't misinterpret my defense of copyright and payment for intellectual labor as a blanket defense of the status quo. A big problem we have is that copyright law effectively no longer binds the largest players.
- thomastjeffery 3y ago
  That vulnerability is entirely the result of a failed system. If we truly valued human life, we wouldn't gatekeep it behind income. It's not just artists who deserve to make a living. Everyone living deserves a living.
  - api 3y ago
    We are incredibly far from the kind of society you're imagining. What I think you have to ask is: if we get rid of copyright now, today, in this economy and society, what will the result be? The result would be large corporations that own channels like Amazon Prime, Netflix, YouTube, AI companies, etc. just strip mining everything and sell it back to people for subscription fees and paying creators $0. The end. (Yes this already happens, but it would happen a lot more and there would be no recourse.) This is the same mistake college Marxists and libertarians make. You can't imagine some kind of idealized society, cherry pick principles and ideas from it, plop them into the real world, and then expect it to magically turn out the way you imagine. The result is almost never what you think.
    - thomastjeffery 3y ago
      How long must we wait? Your argument hinges on the assertion that copyright is actually working. It isn't. We aren't really that far away from a system that can support everyone. If we were, then all the starving artists would be dead.
    - mschuster91 3y ago
      > This is the same mistake college Marxists and libertarians make. You can't imagine some kind of idealized society, cherry pick principles and ideas from it, plop them into the real world, and then expect it to magically turn out the way you imagine. The result is almost never what you think. Keeping everything as it is, never even imagining change, is just as bad though - because eventually change will come and then it will just steamroll over everything. The current best example of such an outside change is AI technology - no matter its dubious origins (=widespread scraping of content), it is hugely disrupting already. And prior to that, we had Covid and the resultant drop in office rents that led to urban planners and CRE investors being in a really massive clusterfuck.
thomastjeffery 3y ago
Copyright is an artificial monopoly. If someone doesn't believe in the validity of copyright, then it's no stretch of the imagination that they could feel ethical competing with it. After all, it's not like rightsholders are actually going to make a competitive service from a vacuum.
- 93po 3y ago
  This is my take, I have zero respect for the concept of intellectual property and care not at all if people make money from piracy. I don't think Disney is going to notice the lost subscription revenue from 50,000 people.
bombcar 3y ago
It's a gray area, no matter what you think about it. Modding a console? Paying someone to do the same mod for you? When it gets to "becoming a company providing similar services" is across the line; if that is legal then there's nothing stopping YouTube from just ripping all content forever and profiting? What if the company is selling hardware that is obviously used for pirated content? How would this apply to things like the iPod? In general, what we have is that big players in the piracy profit area get taken down, small to tiny players do not.
- jorvi 3y ago
  Modding a console is so much different from piracy. Modchips often enable piracy, but in essence they're just freeing your device. It's like removing the SIM lock from a phone.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    Sure, and using them can enable great things like home-brew games, etc. But let's not pretend that the vast majority of modchips and such aren't used to play pirated games, which is where charging for them becomes an issue. Especially when you can still find modded xboxes on eBay today that brag they're coming with lots of "downloaded games".
    - jorvi 3y ago
      Bongs have been freely sold for decades despite being used for something illegal >95% of the time. You can't make it illegal or restricted to sell something purely because it is primarily used for illegal behavior. Or well, you can, but liberal societies generally don't. Note that there are good reasons to restrict sales. Enabling dangerous behavior would be one, which is why we restrict or outright ban the sale of some guns, chemicals, cars, etc.
      - bombcar 3y ago
        Agreed; and if you're selling bongs as they normally are, you get a pass. Same with selling mod chips or modded consoles. It's when the bong is pre-loaded with the goodshit and the console has 2 terabytes of pirated media that you've clearly crossed a line. The gray area comes when you're doing the first, but "wink wink, nudge nudge" letting people know where to get the second. Which I don't really think you can effectively stop, but you can at least not be blatant about it. See Dolphin compared to Yuzu - for me, at least, the line is somewhere in between. Though - to be fair - I could also see a strong argument for full copyright abolition.
parineum 3y ago
> I wonder whether people who defend piracy also defend making money with it. I don't really specifically defend those that make money from piracy as I generally view it as unethical but I do patronize them. Ironic? Maybe but it goes back to the old "service issue" thing. As an example, I've been trying to watch the NHL legally for years. I've gone back and forth between legal and pirate methods as either legal rules change, the service suffers in some way or regional blackouts become unworkable for me. The biggest issue is the blackouts, which require a second service (VPN or otherwise) and a lot of hoops to jump through to even get that working. The newest issue is that the NHL went from providing their own service to partnering with Disney/ESPN+. However, that resulted in degraded service because ESPN+ doesn't have rights to as much as the NHL service used to. National games are generally no longer supported. A game on ESPN is not on ESPN+. Another issue is that I hate being funneled through an app that takes me 12 clicks to get to what I want so that I can be guided through a tour of other content I don't want but I deal with that as long as it works. IPTV solved these issues for me. The problem the legal providers now have is that I know how easy it could be. They essentially need to provide me with and M3U and an EPG (or similar) for me to consider going back to them. Given that the direction they've been going seems to be away from that, I don't hold out hope that is on the horizon.
teddyh 3y ago
If someone made money from piracy, and this was made legal, would not market forces kick in and lower the market price to the cost of labour? Maybe it’s the “someone else's creation” bit that bothers you? But that is begging the question! If copyright were to be eliminated, it would not be, by definition, someone else’s creation. The actual creators may have the right to be associated with (i.e. be credited as the creators of) the original work (eliminating plagiarism and making fraud even more illegal), but the work itself could be monetized in whatever way anyone sees fit, by anyone.

wil421 3y ago

I’ve felt the same since the time of CD burners. If someone gave me a blank disc I would burn whatever mix tape they wanted. There were kids charging $10-$15 per custom mix but I always thought it was not cool. Then when I saw one of the teen girls on trial for MP3 sharing I decided to keep everything for my self. Pay for Plex schemes are similar to the CD selling of the 2000s.

api 3y ago

My opinion on the whole subject of piracy has changed really radically since I was younger. I'm not really a fan of it at all, even without making money, and with making money I think it's definitely not a good thing. The thing that really changed my mind was realizing that the phrase "information wants to be free" just means "intellectual labor will be free." In other words a world where there is no copyright and piracy is standard would be one in which no form of intellectual labor can be compensated. In an economy that is increasingly dematerialized, this is a recipe for extreme wealth disparity and a return to feudalism. Only the owners of physical property would have any ability to earn anything outside service labor. You'd have landlords, large capital-owning corporations, banks, and low-paid no-upward-mobility service jobs. In other words I started to see piracy as an assault on the middle class, almost a tool to bust wages and disempower labor. It also incentivizes locking everything up in the cloud. You can't pirate things if you never have them. Some of this may happen without piracy, but piracy makes it virtually impossible to run a business in any other way. It makes businesses that give you access to data or empower you to run your own software impossible. P.S. The worst form of piracy is the kind that is perpetuated by gigantic corporations. IMHO a lot of the AI revolution is being powered by huge scale piracy. AI is cool but the people providing the training data need to be compensated, especially if their stuff is used to train models that are paywalled and never released. Don't misinterpret my defense of copyright and payment for intellectual labor as a blanket defense of the status quo. A big problem we have is that copyright law effectively no longer binds the largest players.

thomastjeffery 3y ago
That vulnerability is entirely the result of a failed system. If we truly valued human life, we wouldn't gatekeep it behind income. It's not just artists who deserve to make a living. Everyone living deserves a living.
- api 3y ago
  We are incredibly far from the kind of society you're imagining. What I think you have to ask is: if we get rid of copyright now, today, in this economy and society, what will the result be? The result would be large corporations that own channels like Amazon Prime, Netflix, YouTube, AI companies, etc. just strip mining everything and sell it back to people for subscription fees and paying creators $0. The end. (Yes this already happens, but it would happen a lot more and there would be no recourse.) This is the same mistake college Marxists and libertarians make. You can't imagine some kind of idealized society, cherry pick principles and ideas from it, plop them into the real world, and then expect it to magically turn out the way you imagine. The result is almost never what you think.
  - thomastjeffery 3y ago
    How long must we wait? Your argument hinges on the assertion that copyright is actually working. It isn't. We aren't really that far away from a system that can support everyone. If we were, then all the starving artists would be dead.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    > This is the same mistake college Marxists and libertarians make. You can't imagine some kind of idealized society, cherry pick principles and ideas from it, plop them into the real world, and then expect it to magically turn out the way you imagine. The result is almost never what you think. Keeping everything as it is, never even imagining change, is just as bad though - because eventually change will come and then it will just steamroll over everything. The current best example of such an outside change is AI technology - no matter its dubious origins (=widespread scraping of content), it is hugely disrupting already. And prior to that, we had Covid and the resultant drop in office rents that led to urban planners and CRE investors being in a really massive clusterfuck.

thomastjeffery 3y ago

Copyright is an artificial monopoly. If someone doesn't believe in the validity of copyright, then it's no stretch of the imagination that they could feel ethical competing with it. After all, it's not like rightsholders are actually going to make a competitive service from a vacuum.

93po 3y ago
This is my take, I have zero respect for the concept of intellectual property and care not at all if people make money from piracy. I don't think Disney is going to notice the lost subscription revenue from 50,000 people.

bombcar 3y ago

It's a gray area, no matter what you think about it. Modding a console? Paying someone to do the same mod for you? When it gets to "becoming a company providing similar services" is across the line; if that is legal then there's nothing stopping YouTube from just ripping all content forever and profiting? What if the company is selling hardware that is obviously used for pirated content? How would this apply to things like the iPod? In general, what we have is that big players in the piracy profit area get taken down, small to tiny players do not.

jorvi 3y ago
Modding a console is so much different from piracy. Modchips often enable piracy, but in essence they're just freeing your device. It's like removing the SIM lock from a phone.
- bombcar 3y ago
  Sure, and using them can enable great things like home-brew games, etc. But let's not pretend that the vast majority of modchips and such aren't used to play pirated games, which is where charging for them becomes an issue. Especially when you can still find modded xboxes on eBay today that brag they're coming with lots of "downloaded games".
  - jorvi 3y ago
    Bongs have been freely sold for decades despite being used for something illegal >95% of the time. You can't make it illegal or restricted to sell something purely because it is primarily used for illegal behavior. Or well, you can, but liberal societies generally don't. Note that there are good reasons to restrict sales. Enabling dangerous behavior would be one, which is why we restrict or outright ban the sale of some guns, chemicals, cars, etc.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      Agreed; and if you're selling bongs as they normally are, you get a pass. Same with selling mod chips or modded consoles. It's when the bong is pre-loaded with the goodshit and the console has 2 terabytes of pirated media that you've clearly crossed a line. The gray area comes when you're doing the first, but "wink wink, nudge nudge" letting people know where to get the second. Which I don't really think you can effectively stop, but you can at least not be blatant about it. See Dolphin compared to Yuzu - for me, at least, the line is somewhere in between. Though - to be fair - I could also see a strong argument for full copyright abolition.

parineum 3y ago

> I wonder whether people who defend piracy also defend making money with it. I don't really specifically defend those that make money from piracy as I generally view it as unethical but I do patronize them. Ironic? Maybe but it goes back to the old "service issue" thing. As an example, I've been trying to watch the NHL legally for years. I've gone back and forth between legal and pirate methods as either legal rules change, the service suffers in some way or regional blackouts become unworkable for me. The biggest issue is the blackouts, which require a second service (VPN or otherwise) and a lot of hoops to jump through to even get that working. The newest issue is that the NHL went from providing their own service to partnering with Disney/ESPN+. However, that resulted in degraded service because ESPN+ doesn't have rights to as much as the NHL service used to. National games are generally no longer supported. A game on ESPN is not on ESPN+. Another issue is that I hate being funneled through an app that takes me 12 clicks to get to what I want so that I can be guided through a tour of other content I don't want but I deal with that as long as it works. IPTV solved these issues for me. The problem the legal providers now have is that I know how easy it could be. They essentially need to provide me with and M3U and an EPG (or similar) for me to consider going back to them. Given that the direction they've been going seems to be away from that, I don't hold out hope that is on the horizon.

teddyh 3y ago

If someone made money from piracy, and this was made legal, would not market forces kick in and lower the market price to the cost of labour? Maybe it’s the “someone else's creation” bit that bothers you? But that is begging the question! If copyright were to be eliminated, it would not be, by definition, someone else’s creation. The actual creators may have the right to be associated with (i.e. be credited as the creators of) the original work (eliminating plagiarism and making fraud even more illegal), but the work itself could be monetized in whatever way anyone sees fit, by anyone.