neatchee

@neatchee@lemmy.world

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neatchee,

There are lots of reasons to pirate stuff, but this argument in particular boils down to “We should steal stuff now because maybe some day in the future I won’t be able to use the paid version after they go out of business.” And that is shitty.

You bought it, so go crack it now that the license check is broken and nobody will care. That’s GOOD piracy. Support the creators, pirate when you can’t or it’s unreasonable to pay (more).

Don’t just pirate to mitigate theoretical future inconvenience. Do it to circumvent actual inconvenience, or to get things you couldn’t otherwise afford, or to say “fuck you” to big, shitty companies.

But pirating from a small-time dev just in case there are maybe license problems far in the future is not The Way

neatchee,

Yeah, exactly. It’s the same reason I have little hesitance pirating a game I already have when the platform I have it on doesn’t support mods (looking at you, Xbox game pass)

neatchee,

Absolutely. I do that regularly. Purchase to support the creators, pirate to meet some specific use case.

neatchee,

Totally. Though, that case can be a tiny bit tricky. Like, people should be allowed to remove stuff from the Internet that they’ve created if they want, but it should also be okay to archive content that may be abandoned or lost. Hard to create rules that differentiate the two effectively for enforcement

neatchee,

Sure I’m just thinking about how you’d write a law or policy that accommodated both reasonable scenarios

neatchee, (edited )

What’s interesting with the comparison to books is that you can stop it from being published. You can’t force people to give up the copy they already bought, but they can’t make more copies and distribute it.

Hard to draw that distinction in the digital world

And if you want a better comparison, though of YouTube like a drive-in theater. You’re not allowed to make a copy of the film with your camcorder and go distribute it.

neatchee,

This gets into a weird debate about the difference between reproducing a thing and describing a thing. With sufficiently accurate description you can create a reproduction.

And when you take that into the realm of computing, where we’ve functionally automated the process of describing things with extreme accuracy it gets really blurry. But we can all agree that “take what you want, give nothing back” is not a good way to run a society, least of all an economy :D

So we’re left with the task of crafting internally consistent legislation that attempts to allow certain types of reproductions, but not others.

The thing is, this is the type of debate just should be happening at the administrative level, in Congress, etc. But instead, special interest groups and lobbyists are doing the legislating on this stuff.

neatchee,

You misunderstand my meaning: they shouldn’t be able to go out and remove all copies of something in existence. But they should be able to limit distribution of the thing they created, up to and including stopping distribution.

neatchee,

“I’m going to steal stuff because if I don’t then people who NEED to steal it won’t be able to” is some serious mental gymnastics.

Your argument only works for creating cracks, not consuming them. Absolutely create cracks even when they aren’t needed. But that’s not the same as using the crack even when you don’t need to, just because you can

neatchee, (edited )

“Deprive small indie devs of revenue because advertisers would get a cut” is a bad take. Support small developers or don’t use their product. If a small dev chooses to use a platform you don’t like then don’t use their product.

IMO piracy is only justified when it corrects for a problem. Doing it without consideration for who is being harmed isn’t cool.

If taking $1 from Google also means taking $5 from a small dev, you’re doing more harm than good

neatchee,

Chicken stock

neatchee,

I aim to cause this type of psychological damage whenever possible

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