Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

There is no "stealing from corporations"

It's as easy as that

If they keep raising my food subscription I'm gonna start pirating from supermarkets too

Piracy is a response to various kinds of market failure, inequality.

It is always morally acceptable?

Morality is, literally, subjective. There is no universal answer to that question.

I personally consider anything being sold by a distributor to be fair game, no questions asked. If I pay for mainstream music, films or games, most of the time, zero of that money goes to the workers who created those artworks. It just makes rich owners richer, because they legally own rights. I would go as far as to say it's morally wrong to pay for those things, it's not neutral, it's supporting a cycle of abuse at your own expense. So that's my perspective on your 'giant corporations' question.

Digital copying isn't stealing, unfortunately, because those giant companies deserve to have their hoard of capital expropriated.

[src]

No but i dont care

I've been pirating for years. I just don't want to pay for things

It is always morally preferrable to pirate things made by giant corporations

Fixed It For You.

Regardless of what is regarded as a crime against the state, it is wrongdoing against the public to support corporations that seek to extract more wealth than value they produce.

Intellectual property rights were a (very) temporary monopoly to give creators an incentive to create in order to build a robust public domain.

Copyrights, patents and trademarks no longer do that. So charging for content is now rent-seeking

Corporations, their share holders and the plutocrats who own them pull wealth out of the economy by hoarding it. The whenever you buy from anything but directly from the creator, you are reducing the wealth in the economy since your money goes straight into Scrooge McDuck's swimming coffers.

And our public domain only contains stuff from a century ago. Steamboat Willie became public domain just a year or two ago. Copyright holders and courts even assert all content should be owned and licensed, including SCOTUS. (Though the US Supreme Court is a traitor to the United States and its constitution.)

Pirate everything. Steal from companies for they have already stolen from you.

While your mega corporation is extremely rich, if tomorrow everyone starts pirating, that corporation will go bankrupt in a year. And all those TV shows you enjoyed won't be produced anymore. No more new movies with cool stunts and special effects. No more games with insane graphics.

As a consumer of that big corpo content you don't have the moral high ground to say "I never cared anyways about your shitty mass-consumer stuff". You care because you pirated it to watch/play it.

So in the end, you only got your cake because someone else overpaid for theirs. Infinite replicability argument does not hold because it costs money to make content. And it's a risky investment, so at times you want to get more back than you invested, cuz other times you'll spend 50 millions on a game nobody wants to play, and lose 40 of those.

By pirating you inadvertently cause damage to the industry and if everyone followed your steps your favorite games/movies would ceise to exist. But for now it works cuz most people don't pirate. So, are you morally safe, anon?

My moral is always on match with that of the company so in most cases everything is acceptable.

Given that no one makes a fuss about it when corporations do the stealing, I think so.

Worrying about "property" of any parasite is something that I never bother to do.

Giving money to your enemy is idiotic tho.

There is a class war out there and normies are too busy funding their oppressors

No, it’s not like stealing a physical item from a store.

I'd argue stealing physical items from massive corporations is also morally acceptable. If you shoplift from a small mom & pop store, you're actively hurting your community, however, if you shoplift from Wal-Mart, you're actively hurting an entity which is hurting your community, therefore helping your community.

Rage bait. Yawn.

perhaps the only ethical consumption under capitalism is that which denies capitalists their profit.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. If buying isn't owning, then pirating can't be stealing.

I would like to suggest an alternate perspective, that digital media be beholden to protocols not platforms.

In other words lets focus on the drivers of competition...most evidence suggests that piracy goes down in response to easily accessible and affordable market conditions.

The number of examples of media becoming unreachable to paying consumers keeps growing.

Warner Brothers (Max) is the greatest example of this. Years of content from Cartoon Network just disappeared, leaving the consumer no legal avenue to enjoy some of their favorite shows.

I do not advocate for piracy. I advocate for archiving.

When you download music online for free and prevent the company from making a profit off of a creative work by the artist, that they prevented from making a profit & royalties, is that wrong? Doubtful. You can always send the artist money directly if you want to support them.

It literally depends on your morals… it’s a question only you can answer.

Stealing a physical item from a giant corporate store is also always morally acceptable.

Having power neurologically suppresses empathy. Therefor resources controlled by the powerful will on average be used more harmfully. Taking resources from the powerful reduces total harm done.

You will use a loaf of bread less harmfully than Walmart will use the profit from it.

PIRACY IS BAD AND ONLY BAD PEOPLE DO IT.

I’ve never pirated anything in my whole life!

Good thing you said that, I was about to send some agents to have a "nice chat" with you.

"stealing" a digital copy of a movie, tv show or a game is like if the item you're stealing from a store is infinitely copyable.

What if it's a physical Blu-ray? Those are infinitely copyable.

Can you further expand on why you think it's bad? I'm generally curious.

and steal other things as well

The only person stealing is the one who circumvents the DRM and shares it. It’s not stealing to see or hear something.