The real question is how "bad" we should consider copyright infringement to be. For many of us, copyright law has lost its moral footing with draconian DRM, extreme examples of RIAA / MPAA litigation, insane Disney-fueled copyright terms, and a corresponding erosion of the public domain. It may not have lost its legal footing, but legality is not morality, and to call something "bad" because it is illegal is disingenuous.
Or should I remind you how many of our modern societal / legal norms were once illegal?
They mean the word choice, not the act it's describing. "Piracy" smears it as a terrible thing (you're a pirate!), but "sharing" frames it as a good (What do you mean, I was only sharing the movie). The GGP comment switches one biased term for another biased term.
Many programmers seem to have no real care for creators, so it seems moral to them to more or less destroy their wages, force them to make money not off of creating, but touring, beg for tips via Patreon, etc. If the same thing was done to them, they'd be howling how unfair it is. How about your job pays you little to nothing and you need to advertise and get people to support you monthly on a crowdfunding site just to make ends meet in your field?
See, here's the biggest problem with "copyright infringement" as a term; it's too broad. It covers $random_co using your stuff commercially, but it also covers your gran downloading songs from sketchy websites in Russia.
I don't think even the most die-hard of $(insert favorite adjective form of term under discussion) would excuse the first, but quite a few normal, reasonable people would excuse the second, in part, because the economic "harm" is unambiguous in the first case, and impossible to quantify (possibly negative) in the second.
Large multibillion dollar organizations suing grandmothers, printers, and dead people, and claiming $(insert noun form of term) is responsible for $dubious_bignum in "lost sales" isn't helping.
Problem is distributed theft is a new thing for us as people, and it seems to be very hard for us to stop or deal with.
If enough grannies decide to pirate goods (edit), the effect is the same
I question whether this is a thing that significantly exists in the real world, especially given a number of studies [1] that show "pirates" purchase significantly more media (numbers ranging from 30% to 300%) than non-"pirates". If you have numbers on "losses" that don't come from sources that invent numbers out of whole cloth [2], I'd love to see them.
You can't simply treat an unauthorized copy as a lost sale [3]. And for the sake of pete, stop calling it "theft", or at the very least stop making flawed analogies to physical goods.
[1]: http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/research/telecoms-...
[2]: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120206/04501417667/ny-ti...
Do note that the same people who were pirating games/movies i Decades ago are now making them or buying them.
Not to mention that There's more content to consume today - for free, than there is to buy.
Programmers are creators of lots of copyrighted works. Claiming that programmers just want to dismantle somebody else's livelyhood is misguided when we use on the copyright system heavily in our work as well.
On another note, I'm sad to see you downvoted. Your point of view is widely shared by the public and if we're going to enact any change, we as a community should listen to and think about how to address your points.
What you're saying is akin to entering a conversation about the value of cannabis and saying "Let's just call it what it is. Criminal production, distribution and possession of a controlled substance".
I'm disagreeing with the anti-social philosophy, not the legality (though it'd be nice to see the latter change to accommodate what the issues I mentioned).
Then obviously this isn't a primary concern of yours, because why would you rip off crap?
How would you execute "try before you buy" for a novel? You can already get free previews. For a movie? You can view a trailer. You can view reviews. You can rent it, but not for free. I don't see how letting you watch it then deciding if you want to buy it or not will work. How many movies do we keep permanent copies of so we can view them repeatedly? Not many adults I know do this very much.
There are honest complaints about DRM. My gripe with it is that I don't want vendor lock-in on the reading devices. My gripe with research paywalls is for research paid for with public funds. But I have no problem (morally) with the Washington Post asking for a subscription.
To take it when it's not yours is stealing, pure and simple. If it has no value for you then don't take it, and certainly don't redistribute it.
Copyright is a legal fiction, created by governments and enforced by the threat of violence. It is often a useful legal fiction, but absolutely none of it justifies the selfish and self-righteous "MINE!" attitude you seem to espouse in your confusion of physical theft with duplication of ideas.
That's an interesting perspective that we've lost through time as a result of our laws.
This is why DRM scares me so much. What will our society be like when culture says that it's ok that we don't get to tinker, that we don't actually own anything, etc.
Torrenting a movie does not fall into the category of "theft of ideas." It is falls into the category of stealing a work.
As for the argument that things would be made/written etc. anyway, you can still find that. It's out there. If it was better, you would be hearing the music all over the radio. You would be seeing the productions all over TV (because there's no royalty to pay, right?). You do hear and see some, but it's no way for a lot of to make a living. It's not enough. There's no way to take a year off and write that novel that you aren't going to get paid for. So you write a blog instead.
No, some way to protect the work of the people who do it is needed. I appreciate your opinion, but I don't think it's the right answer here.
You're still using words like "theft" and "stealing". Those terms confuse duplication with deprivation. If we had a magic ray gun that could make a copy of any car on the street for basically zero cost, without affecting the original owner of the car, you'd better believe people would use that, and they definitely wouldn't call it stealing.
So when discussing how to reward creators of intangible products for their work (but only if it's actually good -- nobody "deserves" extra money just because they want it), talking about "theft" and "property" is not helping.
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Added in edit:
> You would be seeing the productions all over TV (because there's no royalty to pay, right?).
I don't think we can reasonably use our current reality as proof that it's the only possible reality. We see talented people gravitate toward the available market for their talents, yes, but in the absence of that market I don't see how their talents would just evaporate.
Besides, most of us who oppose current copyright aren't talking about total abolition (at least not until society is completely post-scarcity). We want an acknowledgement that current works stand on the shoulders of past works, and that future works should be allowed and encouraged to do the same, as well as an acknowledgement that technology is changing and the conveniences of that technology should be embraced, not hindered with crap like DRM and oppressive lawsuits.
What if there were no copyrights. Would people still create things? Damn right they will. At least the skilled and the curious people will.
However, the digital world is a changing landscape. Consider how technology replaces humans in the workplace and displaces jobs. No matter what, change causes collateral damage and the reality is this time it's hitting the bottom-line of the wealthy studios. If they can't afford to come up with a brilliant technical solution to the problem then they are SOL. :)
I think the ebook market is a good example. The big companies can absorb ebook piracy just by raising prices and relying on print sales and a large stable of works to deal with weak sales of easily pirated things. But the small presses and indie authors are starting to dry up because piracy tends to hit them much harder as they have less print options (indie authors never get traditional shelf space) no stable of books to offset risk, and a much smaller window when their book is viable.
There's a good argument that creative destruction favors the rich more than the poor, I think.
However, that has always been the case even with piracy aside: when have publishers not squeezed the profits from the artists of the world? Or what about Walmart running small companies out? Spotify paying peanuts to musicians? That's certainly been a trend of capitalism for a long time.
The companies that have means to invest lots of legal and technical resources in developing DMC and help track down those torrent hubs have a lot of money. They are trying to shut them down to protect their bottom-line, not the content producers. It's a business after all.
How about we call it what it really is, Broadcast.
There's a distinct difference between sharing a couple of mixtapes with your friends at school, to broadcasting it all over the internet for millions of your "neighbors" to see.
I agree that the term "piracy" has been redifined to be a crime inline with rape or murder, which sucks; but let's not kid ourselves that publishing a public torrent for everyone to see is just "sharing".
The difference between sharing a half dozen copies to thousands/millions, is indeed broadcasting/publishing, and that IMO is the distinct difference that's conveniently overlooked in these debates.
While putting it all under the label of "sharing" might not be 100% precise, this whole thing was a "problem" long before we could even dream about broadcasting anything.