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GO pre-med bronies
Downloading copyrighted material... be afraid
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GO pre-med bronies
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Tempting... but no. 😀
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Explains why a guy I know on facebook out nowhere started listing drawings of ponies a whenpe ago. The channel G4 sure let it self go...
D
deleted393595
Broke up your post to make it easier to address.
1. The key word here is "must", indicating obligation. The problem is that your generalization doesn't apply everywhere. For example, consumers aren't being forced to buy Rihanna's latest album since it isn't a necessity like water or food. That's why people will NOT buy Rihanna's album even if they had the money to. But what ties this together is that most consumers may not be willing to pay the price that the publishing company is asking for and thus the company would never have been able to sell them the album. But with piracy, the cost of acquisition is significantly decreased versus the benefit obtained by the consumer (Total utility) and the consumer wold therefore pirate the album since the consumer obtains more benefit (utility) for the cost (Economic cost = time + money) invested.
That's why companies can't claim that these are "lost sales". Consumers WOULD NEVER have bought it anyways. It all comes down to Cost vs Utility analysis. There are better arguments against piracy, but this isn't one of them.
But yes, companies do loose revenue. I'm not arguing that fact. I'm only propounding that it's not as bad as companies would like us to believe.
2. I'll look up this stat and re-edit this post when I can find a link to it. And the media company thing goes back to my #1 point.
EDIT: I might have referred to the economic concepts by the wrong jargon, but everything else should be solid (hopefully). And even if consumers HAVE to buy that Intellectual Property from companies, the same concept still applies due to Supply vs Demand in the context of Price Elasticity, but that's a whole another discussion.
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I mainly pirate tv shows, because cable is just too expensive. I would love to support the shows I like and the specific channels that airs them, but cable demands I pay all other channels as well. I for example want only HBO, since a lot of the shows that I watch are aired by said channel. But no, cable says I need to pay for other 50+ channels I do not care for on top of that. Haha, no can do.
I would like to pay for channels I want to watch in order to support their programming, but at the same time I do not want to be giving money to fox news, I honestly just do not care for politics regardless, fox is just an easy example.
Because of this I have to pirate my favorite shows and not fund their programming.
I would like to pay for channels I want to watch in order to support their programming, but at the same time I do not want to be giving money to fox news, I honestly just do not care for politics regardless, fox is just an easy example.
Because of this I have to pirate my favorite shows and not fund their programming.
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Tell that to the people that rely on digital media sales to provide their incomes.
D
deleted393595
Exactly.
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The way I see it there are only two logical stances:
(1) Pirating is completely morally acceptable and is no different than (as somebody mentioned) loaning a DVD one has purchased to a friend.
(2) Pirating is immoral and loaning a purchased DVD (or anything for that matter) to a friend is also immoral (both deprive the seller of "potential sales")
(1) Pirating is completely morally acceptable and is no different than (as somebody mentioned) loaning a DVD one has purchased to a friend.
(2) Pirating is immoral and loaning a purchased DVD (or anything for that matter) to a friend is also immoral (both deprive the seller of "potential sales")
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You don't HAVE to pirate content. You make it sound as if you have no choice. What a tough life we live here in America, where we can't get the channel packages we want and we feel compelled to steal what we want.
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When I watch a movie online, it's always a movie that I do not consider worth the cost of buying a ticket for/paying a rental fee for. No, I would definitely not watch those movies if I had to pay. That doesn't change the fact that I am getting some (usually small) amount of enjoyment from watching the movie that everyone else had to pay for. Just because I wouldn't have chosen to pay to watch the movie doesn't instantly make the movie completely valueless and therefore okay to watch for free.
It almost sounds most similar to finding something on the street that isn't yours. It's not something you'd have bought for yourself, but you willfully pick it up and enjoy the use of it anyway instead of putting it in the lost and found...Except it is intellectual, and after enjoying the use of it, you can't just pull it out of your mind and give it back to the rightful owner. I'm not pretending to have come up with the perfect analogy here, so please don't rip me a new one, but it's not mindblowingly illogical that digital media companies try to seek compensation when others enjoy their property for free for some amount of time. They've put money into creating their product and other people don't have the right to experience that product without buying it from them. I'm not saying pirating is any worse than many other forms of sharing, but frankly I think it makes just as much sense that the owner of the movie, who has not sold his property to the person using it, might try to seek compensation.
In summary, just because I am not a "lost sale" does not mean that, after pirating a movie, I don't now possess something that has some value for free. I mean, technically it's value to me is by definition decreased, since I am not willing to pay full price for it, but it isn't a valueless commodity overall.
(I wonder if in the future, neuroscientists will be able to determine exactly how much a consumer is willing to pay for a certain product, and thereby determine whether to charge the consumer full market value for the product or drastically lower the cost for that consumer only in order to avoid a non-sale. I know that, for most of the movies I watched online, I would have been very willing to pay $1-2 dollars (what I think a bad movie that provides 2 hours of questionable entertainment and a few funny memories is worth) instead of paying the full $10 for a movie ticket. Actually, now that I think about it, there'd be no such thing as a full market value...everyone would be a market unto themselves...companies would feel justified about charging a 500% markup to the one person who wants their product really, really badly...the whole world would go crazy! Aaaaaaaaaaah!
...And just to preempt anyone who says that they value a bad movie that they pirated at $0...no, you don't; you must have ascribed at least some minimal value to the entertainment it provides or you would not have chosen to pirate it and spend your time watching it instead of all the other movies you could have pirated and spent your time watching. The fact that you actively chose it over other entertainment options proves it has at least some minimal value to you because you have at least some minimal amount of demand for it.)
It almost sounds most similar to finding something on the street that isn't yours. It's not something you'd have bought for yourself, but you willfully pick it up and enjoy the use of it anyway instead of putting it in the lost and found...Except it is intellectual, and after enjoying the use of it, you can't just pull it out of your mind and give it back to the rightful owner. I'm not pretending to have come up with the perfect analogy here, so please don't rip me a new one, but it's not mindblowingly illogical that digital media companies try to seek compensation when others enjoy their property for free for some amount of time. They've put money into creating their product and other people don't have the right to experience that product without buying it from them. I'm not saying pirating is any worse than many other forms of sharing, but frankly I think it makes just as much sense that the owner of the movie, who has not sold his property to the person using it, might try to seek compensation.
In summary, just because I am not a "lost sale" does not mean that, after pirating a movie, I don't now possess something that has some value for free. I mean, technically it's value to me is by definition decreased, since I am not willing to pay full price for it, but it isn't a valueless commodity overall.
(I wonder if in the future, neuroscientists will be able to determine exactly how much a consumer is willing to pay for a certain product, and thereby determine whether to charge the consumer full market value for the product or drastically lower the cost for that consumer only in order to avoid a non-sale. I know that, for most of the movies I watched online, I would have been very willing to pay $1-2 dollars (what I think a bad movie that provides 2 hours of questionable entertainment and a few funny memories is worth) instead of paying the full $10 for a movie ticket. Actually, now that I think about it, there'd be no such thing as a full market value...everyone would be a market unto themselves...companies would feel justified about charging a 500% markup to the one person who wants their product really, really badly...the whole world would go crazy! Aaaaaaaaaaah!
...And just to preempt anyone who says that they value a bad movie that they pirated at $0...no, you don't; you must have ascribed at least some minimal value to the entertainment it provides or you would not have chosen to pirate it and spend your time watching it instead of all the other movies you could have pirated and spent your time watching. The fact that you actively chose it over other entertainment options proves it has at least some minimal value to you because you have at least some minimal amount of demand for it.)
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This.
Even though I pirate and don't buy DVDs, I go to the movie theater quite often. If the intertubes didn't exist, I would still not buy the DVDs.
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I pay for digital cable and have a dvr that I choose not to use. I'd rather watch tv on my computer. So do I still need to tell that to tell that to the people that rely on digital media sales when I'm in fact providing for their income?
Now, I completely understand where you're coming from on this. But you are assuming that I would buy music, rent movies, purchase software, ebooks, etc. I wouldn't. If it was a movie I'd just wait for it to pop up on HBO in a year or two, I would just listen to the radio and pandora, I wouldn't buy the software at all, and I might buy a few real books. But I buy the books I really want anyway. They aren't losing any money from me torrenting, and just about everyone I know who does this is in the same boat.
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okay I had to jump in this after reading this thread.
first off downloading anything is a gray area and as such will be viewed differently by everyone.
that said if you had ever loaned someone a dvd, burned a cd for a friend, let a buddy read a good book you just finished, you are doing the same as pirating.
how so?
your friend didnt pay a dime to watch that borrowed movie, didnt pay to listen to the artist music, and didnt buy the book the author wrote.
if you never let a friend borrow anything in your life, I believe you when you say piracy is the devil, if you have then your a hypocrite.
first off downloading anything is a gray area and as such will be viewed differently by everyone.
that said if you had ever loaned someone a dvd, burned a cd for a friend, let a buddy read a good book you just finished, you are doing the same as pirating.
how so?
your friend didnt pay a dime to watch that borrowed movie, didnt pay to listen to the artist music, and didnt buy the book the author wrote.
if you never let a friend borrow anything in your life, I believe you when you say piracy is the devil, if you have then your a hypocrite.
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You don't seem to understand that this doesn't matter. What you would or wouldn't pay is irrelevant, because in today's world you can either pay the asking price or you can go without (I'm talking only about legitimate ways of viewing things, of course). Why does it matter that because something costs money, you wouldn't buy it? By the way, the companies still get paid for publishing to those sources (HBO, Pandora, etc.).
The best analogy that I can come up with at this point is going to a Six Flags park without paying the admission fee. Let's also assume in this pretend world that nothing else costs money and all of the income Six Flags makes is from admissions. Does anyone actually lose by you not paying the entrance fee? For the individual, no, and maybe the park executives wouldn't notice if 5% of their admissions were illegitimate (i.e., "pirated"). But you bet your ass they would notice if 60+% of the people in their park didn't pay for their admission fee, and eventually that proportion might rise to a large enough level that either the price for admission would have to increase or the park would be forced to close. If, in this scenario, you were to say, "well if I had to pay for admission, I wouldn't go," I would say that you are a *****. What does that have to do with anything?
You can't say that the park isn't losing money on every individual that hops the fence and doesn't pay the admission fee yet reaps the benefits of the time and money the company used to create the park. By the same token, you can't say that the companies that you're pirating from - and that used their resources to produce the art that you're now enjoying - aren't losing by you not paying for the media you stole. I feel like this issue is extremely simple save for the attempts to rationalize theft.
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lol i don't want to get into if this is right or wrong.. however my friend has received 7! letters from our internet provider and each time they say they are going to take action .. they never do. plus if you are smart about it they have no way to catch you (ex. break you neighbors internet and use it to download movies lol. just a heads up don't use WEP for encryption it takes around 3 to 4 hours for someone with no skills to crack)
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NickNaylor: The RIAA & Co's knight in shining armor.
Your analogy is absurd. You honestly believe they are losing upwards of 60% in revenue just from pirating? You best be trolling throwing out that figure without any hard data.
i would have to agree with Nick on this one although i won't through any statistics around. the way i see it when a movie comes out everyone has it downloaded the next day and most people don't go to see it anymore. the only people who go see the movie are the diehard fans anymore.
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Other than the proportion of income that is being pirated (I wasn't attempting to base it on real figures, just illustrating the point - you know, like analogies do), how else is it absurd? Just because the park isn't forced to close down because a small proportion of its customers are skipping the admission fee doesn't justify their actions or somehow make it acceptable. Unless, of course, you think it's ok to steal as long as there's not a significant hit on companies' profits.
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Most people I know still go to the movies. You can't replace the movie theater experience by watching a mediocre cam rip on your laptop the day it comes out. Similarly, you can't replace a concert by pirating the CD. That's why most musicians make their money from touring.
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The figures don't matter. What matters is the principle of the thing. You can say this about any service, that if 5% of their profits went missing, they wouldn't notice. It doesn't make it right to do it.
As for the poster above who asked about lending a disc out, that's fine. When you buy a movie, what you are really buying is the rights to that individual disc. You're free to do whatever you feel like with it (other than replicate it, of course).
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You're basically using their talking points. The claim of "robbing" the artist that is perpetuated by these giant corporations is simply absurd and is not grounded on any hard evidence, definitely not to any real extent. Just like they said the radio and cassettes would kill the music industry some decades ago, they have been claiming the internet will do the same. Lazy POSs such as the heads of these companies/lobbies don't like change, especially in the form of less profits.
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😕
I'm pretty sure that they have no problem with the internet now that they've successfully come up with models to monetize their media (be it unlimited monthly downloads, free services like Pandora, direct downloads, or any other models).
I can see from the rest of your response that you're in the "it's ok to steal from people as long as they're rich" crowd. Just keep in mind that an overwhelmingly large number of employees in media industries aren't the super rich executives that you're talking about and using to justify theft.
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You can't say the figures don't matter when the perceived victim is very much saying that they are vital to the matter. The principle of the matter is a gray area, as it has been exhaustively addressed in this thread.
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What if a band attempting to sell its media was saying that they were being severely hurt by pirating? Leave the super rich record conglomerate out of it. Would you be singing a different tune?
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Basically this. Smaller bands depend on media sales. Studio time cost a fortune. The amount of time and effort that goes into an album is insane. Pay respect and pay up if you want to "own" a copy. People who have never been in this situation or worked in the music industry misunderstand the situation of the little guys
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Just because the person you are stealing from doesn't mind it does not make it ok. If they were ok with it, they would allow free downloads. Some artists actually do this, but most do not. Also, I'd love to see where you are getting the idea that media corporations are ok with piracy. Just because they aren't prosecuting it anymore doesn't mean they're ok with it.
Also, it's not a gray area. You've taken a thing that doesn't belong to you. How is that a gray area? Even if you don't call it theft, you have still acquired a good or service without paying for it; that's wrong whether you call it theft or copyright infringement or whatever.
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I'm in the "it's not just black and white" crowd, tyvm. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the ratio of super rich executive to poor employee is not very balanced when it comes to stance on pirating. Also, provide me with some evidence, again, of how pirating has led to less movies/albums being made, mass unemployment in those industries, etc.
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Well I give up. Again, your position is basically that "as long as no one gets hurt, it's ok to do _____," also known as the "it's ok to steal from people as long as they're rich" crowd. But don't say that you're not attempting to rationalize behavior that is, at best, morally dubious. It's not as much of a grey area as you would like to think. You ARE stealing, regardless of whether or not mass unemployment, less movies, etc. are occurring. The fact that you refuse to address any issues that I've brought up and instead ask me to point to the direct impacts of your theft make pretty clear that you have no legitimate ground to stand on.
Game, blouses.
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Where did I say media corps were OK with piracy? They're still selectively prosecuting for obscene amounts, but not as frequently. Obviously, they are not OK with it.
Well, that's the issue. You have not physically taken this "thing." You have an individual who bought the physical thing then decided to share it, as you would with any other thing you bought with no ramifications. The gray area also comes into play in the fact that you are not profiting from this sharing. If you want to support the artist you can still do so. Pirating is not this evil scheme to screw over the artist (as far as I know via my experience).
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Perhaps I was confused by this:
I was assuming the perceived victim was the artist/media corporation.
Just because piracy is not a scheme still does not make it right. You're hardly sharing, either-you're becoming a new source for the material. If you share an album with a friend while hanging out in your room, you still only have one copy of it (the one you paid for). If you make it available online, you allow many other people to make enduring duplicates of it. That's definitely not the same thing.
I'm having trouble seeing where your justification in this is. In what other area of your life is it ok to acquire something, and pay nothing for it?
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But it's OK for you to make blanket statements like "it's bringing the industry down to it's knees and raping the artist and any associated peons" without evidence? Good talk.
And **** your couch.
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I'm not sure where in that comment you are getting me saying that the media corp is OK with pirating. I never said that. I was addressing Nick's comment that the figures didn't matter by saying that the corps DO think they matter and that is why they are taking the measures they are taking.
How is sharing a small scale OK while sharing on a large scale is not OK? Who decides where the cutoff is?
The other areas of my life are not digital. Plus, I acquire Vitamin D from the sun for free.99. You mad?
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best track on that whole album...that I burned from my friend...LOL. Super irony
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Sharing is when you let a friend borrow your CD/movie/whatever.
Pirating / stealing is when you willfully put your media in a position that allows other individuals to obtain an illegitimate copy of that media.
There's a very distinct difference between the two.
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I'm still waiting for you to elucidate this difference.
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Ok, figures aside, piracy is not sharing. Piracy is making duplicate copies of a thing that you are only licensed to own one of.
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At this point, I'm not sure if you're trolling, or if you have some type of reading disability.
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So what are everybody's thoughts on E-Books that are sold to libraries and expire (lock themselves, self-delete, etc...) after a certain number of reads or years? Is it ethical to require a library to purchase access to the book for an extended period of time, i.e. purchase another copy of the book? Making unlimited copies of an E-Book is free, so why should the library be expected to conform to the artificial scarcity applied to the product by the seller?
This whole thread has been debating whether or not "theft" of these media is ethical, but who says the value we attribute to such media is justified?
Just some food for thought. Also, 5 Reasons The Future Will Be Ruled By B.S.
This whole thread has been debating whether or not "theft" of these media is ethical, but who says the value we attribute to such media is justified?
Just some food for thought. Also, 5 Reasons The Future Will Be Ruled By B.S.
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If I was trolling we would be on page 7.
You seem to have a logic disability. You basically described two very similar parameters and claimed some sort of black and white difference that was lolworthy. You can easily classify torrenting as a way to let people borrow a copy of your DVD. Just because new technology makes sharing easy and the "thing" is converted to 0's and 1's it doesn't mean it's not sharing anymore. Willfulness to give out illegitimate copies? You are implying malice that is not necessarily there.
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Making copies of things = borrowing? Might as well "borrow" all of my books while I'm at it, too.
Kids these days.
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Although I agree that the value we attribute to media is often not an accurate reflection of its actual worth, I think the issue still remains that media represents an extension of an individual's (or corporation's) intellectual property rights, and that to treat media differently from other property rights creates an unsustainable double-standard.
The owner of the media is justified in setting whatever price they see fit for their product, just like the consumers are justified in not purchasing that product. Just because the price of a product doesn't conform to an individual's perception of the value of that product doesn't justify theft or piracy. The consumer always has the option of looking elsewhere.
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Here's a different scenario: What if someone is just streaming a movie online? People watch it, but never make "copies" of it. Is that also theft?
The game has changed grandpa. Adapt or gtfo.
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That doesn't change the game at all. If it is a licensed stream, then it's ok, otherwise, it is still a duplicate that wasn't payed for.
I'm still waiting for an explanation of how it is ok to duplicate and distribute media that you don't own the rights to. I'll be here whenever you get me an answer.
