I buy water, I own it. It just passes Thur my body or shower and pipes. That’s like saying you don’t own your tires as they wear away. You can own consumables. I get your underlying point about theft is more then taking away something. You could be depriving someone of money they would have made. Same with copyright theft. Someone buys your product and copies it then sells it. They didn’t steal from you directly but still caused harm. Piracy is a service issue, if things you buy on that service don’t work people will stop using that service. I’m not going to download 12 game launchers to play the games I want, I’ll stick with steam. Same way with tv/movies.
Copyright infringement causes less harm than the copyright itself. Piracy causes less harm than the cruelty and greed in production and distribution of mainstream media. Less harm is caused by theft than by a system that willfully starves the public and vaults away excess to drive demand and market price.
No artists should go hungry but then no non-artist should either. And yet in our system artists are enslaved and had their work taken from them so that enterprisers can live in luxury while the rest of us toil, undernourished.
You could be asking can we get quality content without the artifice of intellectual property to which the answer is yes, and has been demonstrated time and again.
You could ask how many artists get wealthy from producing copyrighted content to which the answer is very few In fact most creators who are good enough to get published by record labels or publishing houses see so little of that money they can’t turn it into a full time career, largely do to Hollywood Accounting but the labels and publishing houses get a lot of money from having controlling ownership of that content.
You could ask what harm is caused by intellectual property laws to which I can reply their expansion from a monopoly limited to a decade or so extended to life + nearly a century has denied the public a robust public domain which was the whole point of copyright inserted into the Constitution of the United States in the first place. It’s made worse because we don’t know what all is copyrighted or patented, judges don’t know what can be copyrighted, and what is considered fair use, or how art even works. (e.g. Not every blockist painting owes money to Pablo Picasso’s estate). It’s a tangled mess with a ton of precedent that favors richer legal war-chests, and has caused a pronounced reduction both of the quantity of content getting made and the quality of that content.
Ahhh, thanks I misunderstood. I do agree but also I have a Plex server. I started it when I worked at blockbuster. Technically even ripping your Blu-rays can be illegal so, you have to find your one morals and not rely on laws.
I meant infringe on the copyright. I don’t think what Disney and some others are doing is right with extending it but I do think the person that created the things should have some legal protection from it being copied for a bit.
Copyright infringement isn’t theft, that’s the main point. It’s breaking a rule that the government created giving people a temporary (now extremely long term, but temporary) right to control the spread of ideas. Whether or not you approve of that law is beside the point. The point being, theft is as old as the ten commandments, if not older. Copyright is a new thing that’s only a few centuries old.
Theft isn’t specific to property, you can steal services too.
You can’t really “steal” services, even though they sometimes call it that. You can access services without authorization, but you’re not stealing anything. You can access services you don’t have authorization to access and then disrupt people who are authorized to use those services. But, again, not stealing. Just disruption.
Stealing deprives a person of something, copyright infringement and unauthorized access to services don’t.
Freelancers may be upset if they’re mistreated, but that doesn’t mean they get to declare they were murdered, or that they were raped, or any other crime that didn’t occur. Theft has a specific definition, and fraud is not the same thing as theft.
You’re being pedantic in the cases you want while complaining to others when they are differently pedantic. I’m not stooping to pretending to misunderstand due to pedantry.
If you are using the term theft colloquially, which most of us are as this is not a court, legal journal, economic journal, etc. Given that colloquial means the way people generally speak, as we are now, theft has a meaning: taking something that’s not yours through force or trickery. That would mean fraud is a type of theft in this case and not a different thing altogether.
So be a pedant I guess but it’s boring and lazy-brained.
I’m all in favour of people being pedantic, especially in the case of laws.
If you are using the term theft colloquially
I’m not, “theft” is misused all the time. It’s something that the copyright cartels encourage because they get to pretend that copyright infringement is theft. It’s not. We should push back and say theft has to meet certain conditions, and copyright infringement isn’t theft. Nor is “wage theft”, which is a form of fraud.
By buying into the colloquial definition of “theft” and expanding the scope to be any time someone is inconvenienced, you give the copyright cartels power to make people think copyright infringement is as bad as actual real theft, when it’s clearly not.
If you’re not going to use the term in a colloquial context while you are in a colloquial setting, then you need to cite what source you are referencing for your definition. Given that you are talking about laws, then you need to recognize that every place defines things differently according to the law. So which law, where?
Being unnecessarily argumentative and snobby while at the same time not meeting your own standards is ridiculous.
So if someone creates a piece of art and I take a photo of it and sell the photo, or create prints of it, or even just give it give that photo to lots of people, what is that?
That is an assumption made that the artist still has the original thing that was not paid for. I understand what you’re being pedantic about. I just don’t think you’re right.
I guess you can’t steal anything when you just decide to limit the definition of the word.
But if we’re in reality and using the way words are actually defined then yes you can steal something intangible, and no it does not require someone to be deprived of something.
You do understand the difference between penal code and the definition of a word, no? Surely the reason why the two are not at all even slightly interchangeable is plainly clear to anyone of reasonable intelligence.
In the state where I live, the penal code includes the legal definitions of words such as “theft”.
The legal system here does not use a Webster’s dictionary to define words. We use the penal code, code of criminal procedure, traffic code and other legal guidance codes to define the meanings of words used in the law and in official government communications.
These are the definitions that would be used by complainants in cases brought against pirates, if such a case were to be brought. For that reason, I believe these definitions are relevant here.
The penal code necessarily uses incredibly narrow definitions with very specific verbiage.
Using the word steal in OPs title is common use of the word, which aligns with the dictionary definition, they certainly are not quoting a legal definition
Get outta here with this dumb shit.
So much ‘verbal’ diarrahhea to try to make yourself feel better about what you’re doing.
I pirate shit, that is a form a theft. Cope with it or stop doing it.
I was genuinely following your debate points until you got to:
Get outta here with this dumb shit.
I have been kind and polite our entire interaction. I didn’t even initially downvote you. In fact, I initially upvoted you. If I’ve worded something in a manner that implied I was attacking you, my apologies.
I’ve simply offered a reason one might include a specific phrase in their definition. There is no reason to be this angry or insulting in such an innocuous and ultimately meaningless debate.
You made some good points. I feel I made some good points. That should be the end of it, whether we agree or not. There’s no need to bring emotion into our interaction other than support for each other’s valid points.
To selectively focus on one small sliver of the definition of the word, ignoring the full meaning of the word and the context to push your agenda? Smells like propaganda.
The entire definition matters. There’s already a term for “copyright infringement” it’s “copyright infringement”. Pretending it’s theft is just a trick the copyright cartels are using to try to make it seem like a serious crime that has existed for millennia instead of a relatively new rule imposed in the last few centuries by the government, then made ridiculous by the entertainment cartel.
You can’t really “steal” services, even though they sometimes call it that.
If you hire me to paint your portrait and then don’t pay me you have stolen my labour. I have given my time and effort and have not been reimbursed for it.
If you paid me and then gave your neighbour a copy of your portrait then you have not stolen my labour.
People who assert property rights (including limited monopoly rights on intellectual property) are doing mental gymnastics too. We’re just used to them, thanks to a century of propaganda after the great depression.
The current state of wealth distribution a century later doesn’t seem to carry the promise that capitalism can be fair.
In fact, IP maximalism (Thanks, Walt!) has denied the public a robust public domain, and our courts struggle to do the mental gymnastics to understand why we have a public domain in the first place.
That is to say, the US and EU have totally lost the plot.
If I were to steal cable, I would be using the cable company’s resources to deliver content to my house without paying for it. If I were to set up an inductor under a power line to steal power, I would be depriving the power company of power they could have sold to somebody else without giving them anything in return.
When I torrent something, I don’t even put any additional load on Netflix’s servers. With their current monetization scheme I don’t even make the show’s producers any less money.
And when you subscribe to 1 or 2 rotating streaming services and only torrent for personal archiving purposes, you aren’t even depriving the streaming services of any revenue.
If you don’t drink a verification can, are you depriving Mountain Dew of their legal right to make you drink verification cans? If you don’t enroll in the IOF, are you depriving Israel of its legal right to murder thousands of darker skinned people? Maybe some legal rights are so stupid they shouldn’t exist?
Yep. The self regulating market is either utopian vision by blind idealists or double speak for maximizing profits and fucking over anybody and anything while doing it.
Yeah I’m a huge pirate but I also have subscriptions to publications, buy a bunch of games, buy music and even have almost every release from a few labels, go to concerts as much as I can. It’s not about the money for me at all
Great idea! It’s up to us to preserve culture, we can’t leave it to those only motivated by profit otherwise cultural history will be lost when it becomes unprofitable.
And since we’re not coordinating, I’d better make sure I preserve the bits of culture important to me.
Digital piracy is not theft, by definition. Theft requires taking something with the intent to deprive the owner, copying things does not deprive the owner.
Digital piracy is copyright infringement, which (in the vast majority of cases) is not even a crime. It is a civil offense.
If you have a hard copy book and someone steals it, you’re not only losing out on the potential sale price of the book, but the tangible value you have already paid to produce that copy.
Say the book is $12, you get $2, the publisher gets $5 - the book store buys it for $7, and sells for $12 making $5 profit. If you steal from the book store, they’ve lost a potential profit of $5, but more importantly they’ve actually lost the $7 they already paid for it. This is what theft is about, the value of a possession taken away, not the potential value.
With a digital book, each individual copy costs nothing. It costs something to make the original, but making a copy is free. Thus the only thing you’ve lost is the potential profit, which arguably you wouldn’t get anyway as the person didn’t want to buy from you to begin with - just because they downloaded it for free does not mean they would have paid full price if a free download wasn’t an option.
With theft, you have a tangible loss. With digital piracy, the only loss is opportunity to profit.
You shouldn’t be denied the stuff you actually use. But people definetly should not be allowed to hoard all the water in the world for themselves.
ASK YOURSELF how did they come to be in possesion of the land of the world?
at some point the entire planet was the commons. With WHAT right did they carve it up and claim it is theres for all eternety?
Just because you weren’t born at the right time you should be denied the use of the world as everybody else? first come first serve basis? how when it isnt yours to decide over.
the people who carved up the world and put their flags in it, and then put fences around anything so that we may never use it and are condemned to sit idly by have robbed all of us of our fair share.
the world is still belonging to the commons.
Nobody owns the air or the moon but only because the moon is out of reach and the air can’t be fenced off otherwise you would have to pay for tides and every breath you take. think about that.
Rethorical question: why didn’t property rights matter when the spanish went to south and middle america? why didn’t they matter when north america was lifted off of the original owners? but now if you take some guys land in the same exact area suddenly property rights matter?
so basically you can go around stealing off of everybody in the world but if somebody steals a lighter or pen off of you they go to jail? make it make sense…
Would you rather everyone can just walk into your house and take whatever they want? I for one am quite happy with the rules and morals we keep.
Those flags put up are often there to keep different cultures with different rules apart. It’s not as easy as erasing borders to have a free world. People are too selfish for that.
Sure, governments still steal all the time. Things are definitely not perfect, but that’s not related to someone stealing your lighter.
Possession is what you literally currently use, I am talking about property things that you do not currently use but still decide over. So the house you live in is in your possession (and also your property) but the 100 others you own are in your property not in your possession.
So nobody should ever be able to take the car you use even if yours is better than mine, or even if i dont have one. But nobody should be able to keep people from using anything they dont use themselves.
does that make sense?
regading selfishness - well currently they are, you are right, I would agree with you there
However just like a tiger in a small cage in a zoo does show unusual behaviour that deviates from its healthy behaviour in the wild. So do we humans under the conditions of lack of freedom show behaviour that is dysfunctional that would not be displayed would we live under freedom. Selfishness at least in that sense is a consequnce of our current conditions. However I do not believe human beings have to be angles before we can stop fencing of most of the world to most of the people.
Selfishness is part of the human condition. Tribes needed to fight over resources and mark their territory in order to keep the tribe alive. It’s in your instinct.
There have always been borders and territories, and there have always been fights and wars over it.
I don’t really see how your “if you don’t use it” policy applies here, and I also think the problem of this topic is easier than that.
Can somebody explain to me, why we need another terminal, file manager, text editor and such? Just to call them all “cosmic apps”? Also who the fuck is going to use any of this on windows or even macOS?? Why waste manpower on this cross-platform compatibility?
It’s been explained 100 times ad nauseam over the last two years. Go read comments from previous months’ updates if you want to catch up.
As for cross-platform compatibility, this should not come as a surprise because everything is written in Rust, and the libraries we use are already cross-platform by default in most instances. Supporting multiple platforms takes almost zero effort on our part. Especially when we could design something from the ground up that’s easy to adapt.
It is looking very promising. I was a bit skeptic at first, but everything is looking quite polished. I am wondering, Will the terminal have support for images, in similar way to kitty or iterm2? And also another thing, Will the file manager has a three pane view? (macos finder, or ranger (tui) style)
I know those two things are missing from gnome equivalents, and are quite handful for productivity, at least for me. Being more advance than gnome, but simpler than KDE would make COSMIC appealing for a lot of people I think.
I really like the idea of COSMIC apps and rust powered cross platform dev tools. But I think that the design language of COSMIC so far still needs some polish, so far it seems like there is so much white space, like they’re afraid to show more information on one screen. :(. Also not a fan of rounded corners. I hope this changes soon after it matures a bit.
I don’t think you can say that because we haven’t published our design language yet. Only a handful of design mockups have been published so far. The screenshots here are not design mockups but a work in progress implementation. Hence the “In-progress” part of the title.
Rounded corners are a user preference in the Appearance page in COSMIC Settings.
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