That's stealing because it deprives someone else of their property. The dealer cannot sell the car once you've stolen it.

"Intellectual property" doesn't really work like that.

Bandwidth, storage, and hosted servers aren't free. Neither are staff.

the income associated with IP very much does.

Just out of curiosity, do they get deprived of the income when I download the content, or when I watch it?

Do they lose more income if I watch the content with friends?

In the early days of photography, people believed that if your photo was taken, it was stealing your soul [1].

I can understand the idea of piracy being wage theft in the same way I can understand the idea of photography being soul theft, but I think both are rather silly ideas.

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/8382

We get deprived of the income when it is consumed without providing money for that service.

If you watch it with your friends, 5 people watch it for one purchase. If it's good, you all tell 3 more people. Of those 15 people, 20 percent end up purchasing a viewing and the system repeats.

When you pirate it you take all the service for zero cost. That affects real people.

What if 6 people watch it for one purchase? Does it become theft then?

How about a college dorm hosting a movie night? Maybe theft?

What if a million people watch it for one purchase? I know you think that's theft, but I'm not sure where you'd draw the line.

I think the reality is that 90% of the population won't pirate because it's too much effort and legally ambiguous. If your content becomes popular through piracy, you will absolutely reap the rewards of good content creation.

If a billion people pirated your content because it was that good, you'd have absolutely no problem monetizing. You'd be a household name. When Disney loses their copyright on the Mouse, they're still going to be a huge company capable of monetizing all things Mickey.

If we get back to a state where everyone is pirating because the content services suck, then you need to petition your content distributors to lower friction and provide an experience worth paying for, but we're nowhere near that.

Gabe does it with Steam. I used to almost exclusively pirate games, and now I almost exclusively buy them, because Steam has value adds (achievements, friends, online play, tournaments, workshop content, etc).

Also, you have to understand that many people who have large collections of pirate content see themselves more as archivists than viewers. I'd guess most pirated content never even gets consumed, just downloaded for a "later" that never comes.

You assume people are going to pay for it. If you provide a good service, they will, as shown by Steam and Spotify and, at least initially, Netflix.

If you don't, they won't, as shown by the proliferation of shitty streaming services and the gutting of content on Netflix.

It's got to suck to feel that people are stealing from you because you have no control over the content distribution mechanisms in the industry you work in, but I think you're largely engaging in fallacious argumentation here. It's pretty much the 90's version of piracy rhetoric. One pirated watch != one watch worth of income lost.

I assume that if people want to enjoy a service without paying for it, it's theft.

It's the "I don't want to pay for it, but I still want to watch it." that seems to be hang up for so many.

Let me explain it simply. That is stealing and it directly affects my ability to make a living as well the motivation for service providers to make more products you enjoy.

What are your thoughts on me and all of my friends and family getting together in my home theatre and watching the latest movie that I paid 4 bucks for on something like Amazon or Youtube?

Is everyone there except me stealing? It feels to me a little bit like the N=1 vs N=0 problem of theism - I'm simply an atheist to one more god than you are. Similarly, I simply don't think it's theft to one more person in that context than you might (of course, here I'm assuming you don't think all those people are stealing).

I am 100 percent okay with it. One entity has provided the fee for service (and afforded me 1/100th of an avocado toast, thank you very much) and is not in their ownership to do as they like.

That they want to share it is their business, not mine. If it's good, those friends will tell other friends and someone along the way will purchase it again, and I'll be even closer to my mortgage busting avocado toast

The hypothetical argument against that is "what if I get 100 friends, for 100 nights to watch it." Sure, hypothetically you could but then it'd be pretty expensive for you and added wear and tear on your home and a pretty big headache to deal with. THe only way to justify it would be to start charging, which at that point, would be stealing. So it always comes across as a thought problem, but I find it's not a real problem.

I don't mind if the town throws a movie festival once a month and plays my movie. I mind if they all get to go home with the luxory of having it on demand and the ability ot share it with everyone they know without providing the service fee requested.

It does not affect your ability to make a living if I consume a copy of your IP that I was not going to pay for in the first place. You have lost nothing you would not lose otherwise, and you have gained nothing you would not gain otherwise.

You gain the value of service without paying the requested fee. If you weren't going to watch it, you wouldn't. Watching it, without paying for it is theft and it takes money from me.

Proof by repeated assertion. The post you are replying to is an effective response to yours. Once more: It does not affect your ability to make a living if I consume a copy of your IP that I was not going to pay for in the first place. Watching it without paying for it does not take money from you, because you would still not have had that money if I had simply not watched it at all.

> If you weren't going to watch it, you wouldn't.

This is flat out false and incredibly obviously so. You can easily see it just by cranking the numbers - if a video game is fun, but costs $500, do you really think that each person who pirates it is depriving the developer of $500? If some magical DRM scheme was implemented that could not be broken and guaranteed every person who played it, bought it, would everyone who pirated it in the previous hypothetical instead buy it for $500? No, they would ignore it, nobody would buy it, and the developer would have just as little money as they had before.

Pirating a piece of IP does not translate 1:1 into a lost sale as you keep variously asserting and acting like it does. It can even turn into a gained sale, in the case of video games or software, when people would not have bought it based on the promotional material but consider it worth buying after actually using it. You have a right to exclusivity on sales - selling pirated material is criminal - but you don't have a right to actually make any sales if nobody wants to buy it.

>if you watch it with your friends, 5 people watch it for one purchase. If it's good, you all tell 3 more people. Of those 15 people, 20 percent end up purchasing a viewing and the system repeats.

or he could have not watched it at all, told no one, and you would have 0% instead of 20%.

Pirating at scale is a real problem, but an individual pirate is just an opportunist. There is a difference between taking something off the shelf vs picking it out of the trash.

There is a small volume of "piracy" that could be considered "picking through the trash". Some (a lot) of entertainment looks like trash to some (a lot) of people and the only reason those people watch it is because it they get to watch it for free. And then when they are pleasantly surprised, they tell people about it. This is the heart of the "i wasnt going to pay for it anyway" argument. Its the type of person who wouldnt pay for a donut, but if you were about to throw them out theyll take one.

Id be curious to see statistics that shows the relation of being successful in the pirate world and successful in the real world. Because that is ultimately related to the argument you are making. that the current state of piracy is hurting your industry, not helping it - since you say this specific pirate is hurting you right now.

it certainly hurts the transactions bottom line when isolated to viewing your bottom line with or without pirate sales - but thats an incomplete financial scenario (this type of thing is my job). you shouldnt assume a gain of x% sales of pirates that 'would have paid for the content if they couldnt get it for free' without also subtracting y% of sales from people 'who only bought it because pirates started the conversation that ultimately led to their purchase'.

Sometimes the marketing for a movie sucks, and not a lot of people are interested in seeing it. There is a small time frame of relevance and pirates might help overcome the shortcomings of marketing efforts and make the movie more relevant which helps it reach more people than it would have.

In all of your discussion, you seem to presume that the pirates knew about and had an interest in your film to begin with. You assumed successful marketing of your film. maybe you're right, and it probably does 'hurt' (tax?) the biggest blockbuster of the year... but 'people who only watch things online for free' is a real community of maybe significant size and i dont know if there has been any work done to try to measure the impact of what penetrating that community has on the financial success of entertainment media in general.

"all theft is bad" is a nice story, but it ultimately is not always true. sometimes companies allow theft on purpose as a form of marketing. They do that as an observational response to the fact that the cause and effect of 'influencers' exists outside of the intent of the people involved.

This leads to a hypothesis that pirating is a form of marketing for your industry. If it were to become too easy to perform or too widespread, it would likely cross a line into being actually damaging. But if the people pirating it are mostly a small group of tech savvy, relatively intelligent, movie enthusiastic people (due to the technical requirements needed to pirate) then maybe when they pirate you they might be autonomously servicing your industry as an influencer. I know it sounds asinine, but if you want to talk money - there are a lot of factors to consider.

So are they stealing? sure. Are they taking money OUT of your pocket? very debatable; unclear. They are influencing with the pool of money that ends up in your pocket, and it isnt so black and white what their actions have on the size of that pool due to the complexity of your industry.

--------------- Sorry for the long post, and it isnt an attack on you or even a support of piracy in general (it might read that way) - i got caught up in mentally exploring the underlying financial model at play in the current market. fwiw im too lazy to pirate, but i still feel there is an incredible difference between people who pirate for themselves vs people who make it easy for others to pirate. People who invite some friends over to watch something they pirated, vs someone who distributes pirated content on common low-tech household media formats like USB, CD, etc.

You are wrong. You’re focusing on the wrong thing here. It’s not whether the good can still be sold, it’s about whether the business can continue to get money.

Say you have a business idea. Perhaps something that you want to patent. I use it and start my own business, rendering your potential business moot.

Did I steal from you? If so, what did I steal?

The difference is obvious. If they steal a Mercedes it's gone, the car dealer does not have it anymore.

@Stunting your perspective in this thread is very valuable, and the best thing that streaming has done, much better than old-school bundling and certainly better than piracy, is encourage a boom in interesting content, and I'm very glad you and the other workers in entertainment are getting paid.

But flogging the tired comparison between stealing physical objects and making illegal copies of content is a losing argument. Everyone instinctively knows it's not the same thing. Just because an end user gains a benefit they didn't pay for doesn't mean it's theft. The owner still has the content and can sell it to as many paying customers as they like. Once the car is gone, it's gone and unavailable to sell to someone else. Consider: what would the auto market look like if we had Star Trek-style replicators and could make copies of physical objects for pennies? Let's use bikes instead. If you had the ability to make cheap copies of a bike, would it be ethical to deny the use of a bike to a poor farmer who could use it to get goods to market and make their life better, when your marginal cost is near zero? Do the needs of the R&D people who designed the bike override that consideration?

This is just as much of a problem for all the software creators on here as for the content creators, though the rise of SAAS has changed that somewhat. Content's inherent non-scarcity is one of the best things that has ever happened to humanity, it just happens to break our pre-existing economic model and hurt the people who create it. This is a fundamental shift in our economy that's underway and we have been lurching around trying to solve it for decades now. We need to solve it, but pretending that it's the same as theft is just not going to get us to a solution.

Or we could all just admit that it's theft.

Society being in a lurch between how we handle our physical goods and our digital goods is a very important subject that is going to get ironed out over the next few generations I'm sure.

That doesn't make it not theft, even if its' really easy to do.

Virtually every dictionary clarifies that theft requires intent to deprive the original owner from using the stolen item, which is incompatible with the act of making a copy.

As gp said, your points are valid, but you're using a word incorrectly. Just use a different word so as not to have dictionaries disagree with you. Copyright infringement.

when you pirate a show, no longer get the contractually based income related to your viewing.

The probability of that income is quite hypothetical. Most of the time, the person would never have payed for it.

Do you believe that if there was no piracy people who pirate wouldn’t watch paid entertainment?

and yet they consume it. Consuming goods and services without providing money for that is...wait for it....

stealing.

Not paying for things that they do not consume is voting with their dollars.

If you steal a physical object, you deprive someone else of having it. Nothing of the sort happens when you copy a media file.

when you steal a viewing of a show, the income related to your consumption is directly stolen from me.

It's not though. You could argue it is indirectly stolen from you by impacting your potential for future earnings, but please explain how the "direct" part of your statement works. Are funds withdrawn from your bank account when someone pirates a movie?

The workforce's income is contractually tied to the amount of post box office profit the film makes. When you steal a show you get the entertainment value without cost of your money. That is directly reflected in my income.

That's fair enough and I did not know that, and will certainly take into account when making future purchasing decisions, thank you.

But the bottom line is, it's just not worth paying for digital content for me, merely by knowing the fact that it's available for free. A file has no intrinsic value, why should I pay for it?

I'll gladly pay for an experience, or service, such as a movie theatre or a streaming platform that does the work of delivering content to me. But there is so much free stuff out there, paying to download the latest Batman movie is simply not worth it.

"When it's so easy to steal why should I pay for it."

When you pay for things you like, more of it gets made.

But what if I don't like Hollywood movies, consider them cheap crap, and don't care if more of them get made? I just want to watch them to see what everyone else is talking about.

Then you are a thief who steals products that you don't enjoy.

But what if someone is not pirating instead of purchasing, they're just pirating instead of doing something else?

You need to consider that maybe the product you are producing is simply not that valuable.

I'm an artist myself. If someone took a photo of something I painted, and started making copies and selling them, yea I'd be pissed. That's what copyright law should be used to protect against.

If someone took a photo of my painting for their personal use, instead of buying one of the photos of my painting that I sell myself, I'd reconsider whether my business model of selling photos is the right one.

> But what if someone is not pirating instead of purchasing, they're just pirating instead of doing something else?

By "something else" do you mean "another activity instead of watching TV/movies/etc," or do you mean "watching TV/movies/etc, just via another method?"

If the former...who cares? That still doesn't justify it. Just because I chose another recreation activity instead of watching a movie doesn't mean that I'm entitled to the movie for free. Not choosing something doesn't have an effect on the price (at least on the micro level; on the macro level, this is of course the concept of "demand," but even if the demand is so low that the "correct" price is effectively $0, that still doesn't give you the right to steal it -- the Intellectual Property is still property of the owner, and they are the only ones who have the right to sell it or give it away, just as you or I have the right to sell or give away any of our property, be it a couch, a TV, a pair of shoes, an idea for a story, whatever. It's all property).

If the latter, what could possibly fit that criteria? You're either getting the TV/movie via official methods or piracy, there isn't any other way. It's binary. There isn't a way to get your hands on a film that is neither officially sanctioned nor piracy.

> You need to consider that maybe the product you are producing is simply not that valuable.

Not that valuable? Are you serious? We're talking about products that are considered "low budget" when they cost 1 million dollars to make and at best receive profits of hundreds of millions of dollars. The entire premise of this thread is that everyone wants to watch everything, they want access to everything (i.e. the demand is high and not going anywhere). They just don't want to pay for multiple separate services -- but only because they can compare to and prefer the brief, golden period wherein everything was accessible on Netflix and Hulu, back when they were the only two games in town and were a breath of fresh air compared to the expensive cable packages (which, might I remind you, people still paid -- economically, that means that the price is considered "fair" and commensurate to demand). Back when Netflix and Hulu were both unsustainably hemorrhaging money, I might add.

Paying for 100% of the streaming services now costs <= your typical cable package just 20 years ago, and that's not even adjusting for inflation. So things are still cheaper than they've ever been, with a not-insignificant raise in convenience and overall quality of the product to boot. Had we jumped from cable packages to the current situation, HN would be jumping with joy.

Just be honest: you want what you want, for as little as you can get it for. And that's fine! That's human nature. What's not fine is, because you can get it for $0 pretty much risk-free, you'll bend over backwards defending why doing so is okay.

(Comment too long for HN, continuing in the next one...)

you are making assumptions about the prerequisites. Talking about "income" implies that the person is viewing a show inside a form of commercial contract like going to a place where the show is displayed or buying a dvd or paying a streaming plateform etc…

Downloading a file (containing the show) from a publicly accessible server on the internet is completely outside of commercial contract so there’s no income in the first place.

Authorities can decide to make it illegal to download files from internet but it’s not "stealing"

Say A makes a film. Situation 1 : B do not watch the film a do something else. Situation 2 : B downloads the film from P2P network and watch it. What is the difference for A ?

They lost a potential sale because someone didn’t have to pay for something.

This is obvious. It’s crazy how many of you are twisting yourself into logical knots to try to justify this action. It’s not murder, but it’s clearly wrong on its face.

I don't know; it seems there is a clear learned aversion to the word "stealing" but doesn't change the unethical nature of the crime is equivalent to stealing royalties deserved for the consumed work. I pirate some times sure but I do so with the understanding that what I am doing is unethical and try to avoid it.

Consuming media/entertainment is no human right and if it is too expensive/too inaccessible/whatever and you wish to be ethical, don't pirate it in the first place.

Humans have great difficulty controlling their impulses especially in connection to crimes that are undetectable and easy to perform but the honest will at least own up to what they do.