And yet you can borrow anything from the local library for free and its considered totally fine and not pirating.
this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2025
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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I'm not going to say piracy is right or wrong.
What I will say is if everyone had access to that replicator, and everyone replicated everything in the store and left, the store would close down, and the products would stop being made.
Likewise, piracy is only viable because not everyone does it. If literally every person pirated the games or movies of any given company, that company would no longer be profitable and would close down.
Piracy is getting something for free because other people pay for it.
Except there are people who buy something AND want to have offline backup copies of it.
They promised they would go out of business if I pirated their content, and that was a lie.
And of course, they did go out of business. That's why they need welfare from the government now.
You should never pirate anything, that would be bad.
There are people who understand what I'm saying, and then there's the idiots that downvoted me on some of the comments I posted
If "buying" is not owning, then "piracy" is not stealing.
Why do you have to take a moral stance?
Do it because it’s cool
Private property is theft piracy in all forms is morally exceptable. DMCA actively harms progress, and this isn't some techbro take as I disagree with AI.
my view on it lies in two seperate buckets:
- if the thing being pirated is vastly overpriced for its function i don't see it as immoral
- if the thing being pirated is no longer available or was never made available for private ownership, ie only able to be streamed and only available on said service so long as the host streamer still has rights to do so, it isn't immoral.
and just to be clear, i don't see piracy as inherently evil or anticapitalistic. there have been several books and apps that i pirated that i liked and converted to an actual buyer to get more books in the series or get updates to the program.
I mean, the replicator is making food out of SOMETHING. I'm guessing it's some kind of waste produce from the engine room. It needs matter to operate. It can't create ex-nihilo.
The replicator from Star Trek makes matter out of pure energy, not out of other matter. It can make almost anything out of matter, so long as it has the molecular pattern on file, and the ship has enough energy available to power the replicators. That energy comes primarily from energy storage dedicated to replicator production, but in emergencies where a massive amount of matter need fabricated, additional power can be provided by the warp core.
So they're using several hiroshima's or nagasaki's worth of nuclear bomb's energy to produce a cup of Earl Gray, hot? Seems like using garbage or human waste would save a lot of energy?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the power required to produce a small amount of matter?
While we're at it, is a transporter actually transporting me? Or is it technically really replicating me?
Because what I assumed was happening was they essentially had a transporter like device that would take some matter (say a big pile of human dung) transport it (i.e, convert it into the energy the transporter uses run it through a pattern buffer that's stored in the transporter for say, Earl Gray hot) and beam it into the Captain's quarters as Earl Gray hot instead of poop.
A cup of tea is around 500megatons if you convert all the matter into energy. We’re talking a few thousand Hiroshimas.
It is always morally acceptable to pirate things ~~made by giant corporations~~
Fixed it for you.
I'd make a point saying that there's a personal moral and a broader societal understanding of morality, and they don't always align.
That's a fair point.
Big agree, also now I want to rewatch Sabrina the Teenage Witch lol
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.
But if not a lot of sales are made, they won’t work with the same people again and will play more safely, and we’ll get less diversity
But maybe the people who were working in big studio movies would shift to independent film making with lower budgets and more diversity.
Obviously it's also not a good solution, but do we need the big studios to make yet another avengers or minions?
¿Por qué no los dos?
I pirate to save money =]
I do since it's a better service
Personally I don't really care too much about whether it's moral or not. I pirate when I feel like it and don't when I don't feel like it. I also pay for some things that I pirated before and enjoyed as long as it isn't too expensive.
No but i dont care
I've been pirating for years. I just don't want to pay for things
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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.
Shoplifting from Walmart hurts my knees because the boss won't believe that our onhand numbers are wrong and makes me check high and low before I can nil pick it 🥲
This isn't an ethical argument against shoplifting btw, this is an ethical argument in favor of nuking Walmart
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Given that no one makes a fuss about it when corporations do the stealing, I think so.
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.
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
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perhaps the only ethical consumption under capitalism is that which denies capitalists their profit.
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I've said it before, and I'll say it again. If buying isn't owning, then pirating can't be stealing.
My moral is always on match with that of the company so in most cases everything is acceptable.
I decided on my moral beliefs on piracy back during the days of Kazaa and Limewire. Back then the RIAA was shaking down teenagers, threatening them with statutory liabilities of a quarter million dollars per song, simply because the law allowed it. They would threaten low-income families with lawsuits in the millions and get them to settle for a still-ridiculous settlement of few thousand dollars. Even the settlements were far in excess of the full retail cost of purchasing these songs.
I decided then that if the law allows this kind of thing, then copyright law as it exists now is fundamentally immoral. And immoral laws are not worthy of respect.
I mostly take a pragmatic approach to copyright. Whether I pay for something is a combination of the quality of the work, the reputation of the company selling it, the customer service provided by the legitimate product, the probability of getting caught for violating copyright law, etc. An indie publisher that treats their people well? I'll buy it. Mass market schlock made by criminally underpaid artists for rent-seeking megacorps? I'll pirate that all day, every day.
But morality literally plays no part in it. I learned long ago that copyright law exists outside of the realm of morality. The decision to buy or pirate is an entirely practical one; morality simply isn't a factor.
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