They’re anti-social. These are the same people who drive in the HOV lane with nobody else in the car, or litter or jaywalk. They’re free riders. They violate the following moral principle: “If everyone did what I’m doing, what would happen?” In the case of piracy, the thing you’re downloading wouldn’t exist unless the majority of people followed the rules.

Essentially repeating the same BS analogies with the "would you steal a car" campaign 20 years ago.

The commercial success of movies is measured at the cinema screenings. This is implicitly accepted even by studios. When a film is labeled as a failure, it is because it didn't break even at the cinema. Given that, I'm all in for heavy-handed crackdown on pirating content still screening at cinemas.

Whatever comes after cinema screenings, is just milking the cow for as long as the current laws permit it. The problem in the case of USA, is that the law permits this virtually forever. So this is a case where the law is being antisocial, enforcing copyright protection of works that should have been in the public domain long time ago. Good for Swiss people that they're not living in a USA protectorate and they can have their own laws.

Isn't this, like, the opposite of the truth? Theater revenue is a small fraction of the total revenue from a film. From where did you draw the impression that it was otherwise?

I've seen some industry insiders talk about how box-office takings effectively "snapshot" later earnings. So the TV syndication rights or streaming rights will pay out based on the box office (and possibly even just the opening weekend).

Certainly this isn't always true: The Room has been running for a long time, and is now presumably much more valuable than its initial box office would suggest. But I don't think that most movies become cult hits, and their revenue is probably closely related to initial box office.

I don't have a source for this beyond reddit comments though.

"In the film and media industry, if a film released in theatres fails to break even by a large amount, it is considered a box office bomb (or box office flop), thus losing money for the distributor, studio, and/or production company that invested in it." [1]

Also keep in mind that Hollywood typically inflates costs to avoid taxes and royalties [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_biggest_box-office_bom... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

Yeah, you haven't answered the question. A box-office bomb does badly at the box office; that's all it means.

Yeah, you're not very good at reading. What part of "thus losing money for the distributor, studio, and/or production company that invested in it" did you miss? Would "box office flop" even exist as a term if the box office was not the main source of revenue for films?

And since we're here, from where did you draw the impression that it was otherwise?

From a source that actually broke down revenue from movie releases between box office and home viewing, thus refuting your original argument?

It's also the old "nothing would exist without scarcity and profit motive" argument.

If Star Trek style replicators were invented today, there'd be people trying to ban them.

> They violate the following moral principle: “If everyone did what I’m doing, what would happen?”

This is probably me being stupid but I have a little trouble understanding exactly how to apply this principle in practice.

Example: assume for the sake of argument that living in a suburb requires enough additional resources (land, energy, whatever) that if "everyone did it" in your state/country then it would become infeasible and there would be no suburbs as we know them today. But luckily enough people naturally prefer to live in a city that things just work out. Does that mean the people living in the suburb are nonetheless "anti-social"?

I suspect not but I'm having trouble identifying a clear reason why the moral principle does not apply to that situation but it does apply to the situation where some people abuse the HOV lane and some people don't.

Is it the existence of a rule forbidding it? In that case the principle seems more to be about the rule than about "what if everyone did it?".

Is it restricted to the situation where "free riding" is universally preferable on an individual basis, and only self-restraint prevents people from being free riders? If so then piracy advocates can save their argument by arguing (truthfully) that some people simply prefer to support the creators and they don't.

What am I missing?

> Is it the existence of a rule forbidding it? In that case the principle seems more to be about the rule than about "what if everyone did it?".

The vast majority of the US lives outside what we’d consider “the city” so that’s a bad example. But anyway the difference is that the act in question involves payment for a scarce resource. If everyone paid for a house in the suburbs (assuming that the prices factored in externalities) then it would be fine because prices would regulate land use. And if the price doesn’t include externalities then it is antisocial to live in the suburbs, as folks here in HN point out regularly.

To me it feels like you are arguing that the guiding principle for whether an action is "antisocial" is whether you are free riding or imposing externalities: getting a benefit at other people's expense.

Which is a fine moral principle, and does easily distinguish between all your "antisocial" examples and my "housing choice" example (assuming correct prices).

But it doesn't seem to require the "what if everyone did it?" principle. So I'm wondering if that principle brings any additional value, or indeed if it is a real moral principle at all. Hence my question.

If everybody lived in the suburbs there would be endless rows of cookie-cutter houses with a law in the front and a swimming pool in the back. You would have loops upon loops of cul-de-sacs that just meandered in residential housing blocks. Every 50 miles or so you would have a mall with box stores and you grocery stores would be so big that they would have little electric cars in them to get from one side to the other. Because shopping would be such a big PITA, people would buy mayonaise in 1 gallon jars and would buy vans just so they could transport all of their groceries for a month. Children would have to be bussed to school because the low population density would make a school within walking distance too expensive. Likewise children would be shipped around in their parent's van because soccer fields and basebase fields would be too distant to get to by foot. Public transport would be so expensive that you couldn't have a reliable and prompt service for any reasonable price. People would drive one or two hours to get to work -- each way. Since they would be either commuting or working for 11-12 hours a day, a couple would need 2 vehicles: the van for buying monthly supplies and carting the kids around as well as another vehicle to go to work. The increased load on the traffic system would mean that it would be almost crazy to consider riding a bicycle. All the roads would be set up for cars because it would be the only reasonable transportation that could work. The expensive of maintaining 2 cars, driving all over the city all the time, keeping the house in shape and the garden in shape would mean that in many households both parents would have to work to make ends meet. The children would have to be looked after by a service for most of the day, every day of the week.

Of course many people can't afford to buy a house in the suburbs. Thank goodness.

You basically just described the suburbs of an Australian city. The only difference is we have way more supermarkets than that.

Man, I wish I could have quickly thought of a different example. I tried to avoid starting a housing debate with "assume for the sake of argument," but it doesn't feel like it worked!

> In the case of piracy, the thing you’re downloading wouldn’t exist unless the majority of people followed the rules.

They would be forced to adapt, just like other industries adapt to changing social behaviour or technology. Maybe more movies would be crowdfunded (Kickstarter-style or Patreon-style). Maybe they would have product placements. Maybe something else entirely.

Things change -- you either adapt or you go out of business.

(For the record, I personally do not pirate. I rarely watch movies or shows anymore, listen to all my music on a premium spotify account and buy all the games I play and non-open-source software that I use.)

Maybe they would jointly fund an online streaming service with predictable prices for the product, similar to what we see in music streaming...

It's a stretch to equate piracy to unjust usage of a scarce resource.

> They violate the following moral principle: “If everyone did what I’m doing, what would happen?”

The reason a lot of people, perhaps most, don't follow that idea is because it's a lot like the slippery slope fallacy. Hypothetically, if everyone pirated all their content, perhaps there'd be serious problems as a result. In reality, that's never actually going to happen.

Some other sucker is paying for your entertainment, so it's all cool?

I never said that. I just don't find the "if everyone did that" argument very compelling. For instance, if all 7.7 billion people lit wood fires every day, we'd have ash constantly falling down on us and the skies would be darkened, but we don't need to feel bad about setting the occasional campfire because the reality is that most people aren't going to be lighting fires all the time.

If too many people started burning wood and it began to pollute the environment, then a law would be passed banning it. And in fact, that's exactly what happened. There are burn bans happening all the time all over the world -- especially on the west coast.

https://forums.jlconline.com/forums/forum/jlc-online-peer-to...

The USA and other modern countries found that too many people not paying creators for their work caused problems and passed laws against doing it.

This is all working exactly how it is supposed to, so yeah, the "If everyone did that" is exactly compelling.

The opposite is true, you know. If people paid for more of what is good, pick up litter, and be nice to people, then the world would get better. If everyone reduced their carbon foot print, imagine how many more species would still exist today!

All you did was nitpick my argument and completely ignore the point I was making. Congratulations for fixating on details and not seeing the bigger picture.

> If people paid for more of what is good, pick up litter, and be nice to people, then the world would get better. If everyone reduced their carbon foot print, imagine how many more species would still exist today!

And yet they don't all do that. If everyone on earth just held hands and sang Kum Ba Ya, there could be world peace, but nobody's going to believe that's the way to end wars because not enough people are practically going to do that.

This is why "if everyone did that" can be used in a way that's fallacious, and it's insidious because it's true given that one accept the premise of universal participation. But even during the heyday of digital piracy, most people weren't pirating, or even pirating all of their consumed content. Hollywood and the like didn't ever come close to collapsing due to piracy.

All you need to do is to challenge piracy on a moral level. It's universally agreed upon that taking something without paying for it is a bad thing. Just because there is a minority of piracy advocates doesn't mean that those advocates don't recognize that they are doing something wrong. Saying "if everyone did that" just dilutes the impact of a single immoral act. Sure, I can imagine an off-the-wall situation were everyone pirated content. That image just isn't very realistic or useful in judging whether something is right or wrong. Fires might have been a bad example because, as you pointed out, we did ban burning in many places.

I couldn't disagree with this statement more; I believe this kind of thinking is human nature and is in no way limited to "privileged people". People are willing to put up with a fixed amount of inconvenience or spend a set dollar amount on entertainment. When the inconvenience or cost becomes to costly they look for alternatives.

These media companies are increasing the inconvenience (moving the product from service to service, requiring cancelling one and signing up with another) and increasing the cost (the alternative is to subscribe to more services). A rise in piracy seems the reasonable outcome anyone would expect.

> When the inconvenience or cost becomes to costly they look for alternatives.

The alternative for an ethical person is not taking something you shouldn't.

That is your opinion. It does not change the facts as stated and, in my opinion, is not a helpful way of framing the issue. Certainly is isn't helping media companies sell more content nor is it helping their customers consume more content.

> That is your opinion.

Since when did stealing = unethical become an opinion?

Ethical or not people look for alternatives if they feel the cost is too high.

No. What you’re dancing around saying is that unethical people steal when they don’t want to pay.

I am totally not dancing around it, that is straight up the observable and factual reality of the world that we live in.

I do think that painting everyone who commits a crime of any magnitude with the same broad brush is unhelpful if you are, say, a large media company trying to make the big money.