Allow me to reference a very famous Bill Gates quote on Chinese piracy of software:

"And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."

There are more ways to monetize a media property than pay-per-view so to speak. Merchandising is a big one, not to mention word of mouth marketing.

My point is strictly relating to the business end result of the following three alternatives:

1) DO pay for and DO consume digital product.

2) NOT pay for but DO consume digital product.

3) NOT pay for and NOT consume digital product.

Only alternatives #1 and #2 provides a way to monetize the consumer, either via direct monetization of the product (ie pay-per-view) or indirect monetization (ie merchandizing, willingness to pay for new versions of the product in the future, etc), or by leveraging that consumer as a marketing agent to bring in additional consumers (ie that consumer's best friend ended up being monetizable when previously they would have never heard of your media property).

Because there is no expense to the business when a digital product is pirated, then intelligent business management would always prefer option 2 to option 3. That said, business management cannot publicly endorse this preference without the threat of converting #1 consumers into #2 consumers (which are still more valuable than #3 but arguably less than #1).

There's a clear correlation between ease of access and reduced piracy in music and games. TV and movies are in a funny place right now where in some ways the situation is arguably worse than it was 10 years ago - back then you could be reasonably assured that you could find whatever you wanted at Blockbuster and it would work in your DVD player. Nowadays finding which providers have the rights to the content you want to watch, and whether they can be watched on your proprietary devices can be a nightmare.

Meanwhile, the piracy route for the most part works completely seamlessly. Using Popcorn Time for me is a better experience than the legal route - that's indicative of major problems.

To be clear, I am not promoting piracy, it does pose ethical problems. The metaphor to stealing simply fails to illuminate any of them.

So in a very real sense, stealing the soda and stealing the movie are hardly any different?

The corner store lost nothing.

But again, stealing a soda voids the ability for someone else to obtain the good. "Stealing" a movie via piracy doesn't neglect someone else from obtain the good. This is the GP's point - stealing implies there is something of loss.

One more time, boys and girls:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4

It's all too easy to make such a claim - particularly if you are the one benefiting from piracy.

If the couple chose not to watch the movie, they aren't going to sit and stare at a blank wall for two hours. Maybe they would have watched a movie on regular TV with ads - thereby benefiting the businesses who placed the ads. Maybe they would have watched a movie on Netflix who therefore gave a small percentage of the Netflix subscription fee to the movie studio. And maybe a month later Google fix the technical problems and the couple decide to pay to watch the original movie.

The point is that if the couple hadn't downloaded the movie illegally, somebody somewhere would probably have been financially better off.

I think it illuminates that you got to have/experience something without paying for it, despite the fact that the distributor wanted you to.

If I hire a programmer I get software from the programmer's time. The programmer's time is an expended resource.

If I buy a Coke I get a bottle full of liquid. There was a loss of resources to get it me.

Once that programmer has already written the software there is no cost to duplicate it infinitely. Same with movies.

Since it requires no resources why is there a distributor? A middleman has to work hard to provide his value. Netflix does with impeccable service and high reliability. In this case Google failed. Torrents use otherwise unused bandwidth (ie no resource) and are the baseline for value that these middlemen must compete with.

Imagine I really want your car, so I take it. Or imagine I really want your car, so I use a magic wand to make an exact duplicate of it. Are those two scenarios at all comparable?

This argument fall apart in many of the examples cited in this thread because most of the time, those movies are available digitally for a price. The fact is that most people just don't want to pay that price so they use other means to watch the movie.

The issue, of course, is whether or not you're correctly estimating whether you would end up buying it if you didn't pirate it. But if you take it as given that you wouldn't buy it, then there's no loss.

One is robbery of scarce resources, one is a legal framework around imposing scarcity on something that is not naturally scarce.

You can steal a movie - in the traditional sense of the word - by breaking into MGM / Disney / Universal's internal network and copying the movie out from their own internal servers. This does happen, where scene releases of unreleased movies happen, often done by employees with access to get access to these films prematurely. That is the only situation remotely comparable to the shoplifting scenario, because in the normal piracy scenario nobody is not voluntarily participating (the original buyer of the movie who then shared it did a voluntary transaction, then violated the distribution terms given them when distributing it to others voluntarily).

Violating a contract and violence are on entirely different planes of ethics.

While we might disagree on the moral shading of copyright infringement can we agree that piracy and theft are different things?

I'm a pragmatist. I see folks wanting to avoid disappointment (can't see favorite show) suddenly becoming theoretical philosophers. Like a 12-year-old deciding their older brother's belongings really belong to everybody, because socialism or whatever.

If you consider yourself a pragmatist, you should also consider that you have under analyzed the issue at hand and that trying to generalize digital media with anecdotes of exchange for goods or services in meat space is inappropriate.

Your position sounds more rooted in laziness than pragmatism, at this rate.

I can understand (though not agree with) the point of view that people are selfish and just make up excuses to justify to themselves and others that they are in the right whenever they take some action that benefits themselves.

But I don't understand why you would attribute those selfish, self-justifying motives only to those that make copies of digital media but not to those who proclaim to "own" them or who decry copying as theft?

Wouldn't your view also have to apply to the whole concept of ownership, which you'd have to dismiss as a pretension to "theoretical philosophy"?

Pirates don't deprive distributors or content producers of anything. No harm has been done.

But amazingly, folks accept whatever argument gives them free entertainment. Objections are suddenly 'irrelevant' when watching their favorite TV show is at stake.

Folks who wouldn't go in the back window of a bar to avoid the cover charge, will gladly go in the back way online to hear their favorite band. And they rely on the (pretty indirect) argument about how the source is generated to rationalize it.

Pardon me for my cynicism.

Stop using physical examples, they don't correlate to a digital good that can be duplicated digitally, with no physical presence.

I understand they were frustrated in their efforts to be entertained. Then took what they wanted. Which is pretty much the definition of 'entitled'

Everything is pretty much physical in the real world. Like the physical time and effort folks make to provide services and market them.

The word "took" when applied to physical objects implies that only one person (the one who took it) has that object, and the one it was taken from no longer has it.

In the digital world that can only happen if the original is deleted or destroyed, which does not happen in the case of a copy or a "pirating". The original is still in the possession of the "owner", but now also in the possession of the copier. The "owner" does not lose his own copy, so nothing is "taken" from him.

It's analogous, in the physical world, to making a photograph of a photograph. The original photograph still exists, and the "owner" of the original photograph does not have anything "taken" from them by the existence of a copy in the possession of someone else (except perhaps in the legal or potential sense -- depending on the laws, the jurisdiction, and the interpretation of those laws -- but certainly not in any kind of physical sense).

What does the time and effort required matter in anyway in this case? If something is copied, it is copied. They can't lose something they didn't have. If I could clone a car and then I took that cloned car is it still the same as stealing the original car? No, if a friend cloned me their car I don't see how you could even come close to saying it was the same as stealing the car.

Are they entitled to the entertainment? Sure, why not? If they tried to get it already why not. Not to mention in this day in age there is a lot more social pressure to be up to date with current hit tv shows and movies. And sure, you could be "that guy" who doesn't watch these things, but most don't want to be in that group.

So yes, if they tried to get it legally, and the legal system failed and wasted their time, I do see them entitled to try another avenue even if it may not be legal. I would not say the same about a physical item.

If you, unauthorized, print out a photo and hang it in your apartment to enjoy you've probably committed IP infringement of some kind.

Have you committed theft though? Is it the same severity as pickpocketing someone's wallet/purse?

It's important to distinguish because it informs how we should treat these things, legally.

Rents are completely inherent in entertainment product - it's just that we have a faux facade of competition between services for the charging of rents. This is confusing.

How many more works does the author create in the +70 years after death ? If the answer (I suspect) is zero, what possible:

".. promotion of the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

can there be in that time ?

There's a lot of reasons that analogies between mom and pop face-to-face businesses and massively-middleman'd intermediary transactions break down; this is just one of them.

So you're still going to pay for it. That's not the same as the story here, where they paid for it, got a refund, then got it for "free". They aren't intending to go to the content creators and hand them $5 for it later.

You might argue that publishers and distributors will hold their portion of the $5 for the next piece of content.

I, like you, am disturbed by the "if it's easy to steal then it's ok to steal" argument. It really hurts people who make a living as creatives.

You may be OK losing the provider's portion to assure the creator is paid.

1) they actually did pay to rent it.

2) the content owners don't lose more money weather it's "stollen" or just not watched at all. (In fact, it's better in some ways since these people will tell their friends about it now who may also watch it)

If you read it again you'll see the person paid for the product and then the product they paid for was kept from them

Same thing happened to me, I tried to rent a film on touyube but the stream consistently erred after 2s of low quality viewing.. what really bugged me was I could watch any trending video on the free service without issue on any quality setting but the movie I paid for lacked the same supply attention and was buggy for the entire rental window

Who's going to go after googs for the 6$ I spent trying to watch a movie but an error on touyube stopped me from having the access I paid for?

How is it high ground to withhold sympathy when it is a mega corps stealing from a user?

p.s. If you read it again, you'll see that the person asked for a refund. It's somewhat unclear at this point whether that refund was granted, but my interpretation is that they did.

Shoplifting is when someone buys something, then has it withheld from them, then get a refund, then access that product from someone else offering to share it with them?

I guess I was trying to move the conversation away from what I see as a flawed analogy to what I think is technically interesting, and that I have first hand experience with, in that the companies offering paid services fail to support them to the same standard as their free services

For the record the phone time seeking the refund, for me, lacked an appropriate roi so i am out the money and was stunted from exposing myself to the media.. media which the creator and distributor trusted goog with making available to me

There are so many interesting subtleties it's frustrating to bury the conversation in a flawed analogy

To be an issue of entitlement the person would have to say something that sets them apart, akin to: it's ok for me to pirate but for everyone else its bad;

Whereas the gp was just describing their process without applying any opinion on the ethics of others doing the same

an excuse is just an excuse, the special treatment is what makes it entitled

Have you ever pirated anything? If you have then your position would make you the entitled one because you are claiming it is wrong for this person to pirate though you have done so yourself

Why offer your opinion with lazy pithy statements and attempts to compartmentalise complex ideas into a single word?

It reads so demonstrative and finite as if these issues lack any capacity for dialogue

I think your perspective is important to this conversation but I'm unable to access it due to how you are presenting it