•  ccdfa   ( @ccdfa@lemm.ee ) 
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      5910 months ago

      I can’t find it now, but there was that one text post that went something like “1. Copying a movie costs the studio money, 2. Download a movie, 3. Make 1000 copies, 4. Studio goes bankrupt”

      •  maynarkh   ( @maynarkh@feddit.nl ) 
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        3110 months ago

        I saw one where it went:

        • Publish a copyrighted work
        • Sell it for 10 bucks
        • Have a friend pirate it 100 million times
        • Declare bankruptcy
        • Have the friend delete his copies
        • You’re a billionaire now
    • Whatever you need to tell yourself to sleep at night. It’s definitely stealing. This is a piracy community. Don’t feign moral superiority. They offer a product, you don’t want to buy the product so you find it for free elsewhere. A digital file that you experience for a cost is no different than a book you buy from a store, regardless of the state of ownership after the fact. And regardless if it’s a locally published author or a multi billion dollar studio, there’s a cost of entry. Semantics is all you’re arguing, not the legitimacy of piracy, when you share that copypasta.

          • You are wrong. You are talking about copyright infringement, which is a civil matter and not a criminal one. That means the party whose rights have been infringed must prove that and sue you. But you won’t go to jail if convicted, you’ll have to pay damages. That’s why the Netherlands, for example, used to be safe for torrenting. It wasn’t legal, but copyright holders did not have the right to get account details from providers for IP addresses that were caught sharing content (sharing, not downloading) and thus had no one to sue. If it were a criminal matter, the state would be after you and they have a lot more rights.

      • In this case, the phrase’s become more popular because people buy digital goods and, due to business shenanigans, they lose access to it, like buying a digital copy of a movie, “owning it”, then no longer being able to access it because Sony couldn’t be arsed to get the rights sorted out.

        There’s also the numerous situations where you can’t legally own media, simply because it’s not up for sale, like the vast majority of content on streaming sites. There’s no way to own and consume some media except through the provider. It’s still illegal, it’s still an unauthorized copy, but in this case, it’s the only way to “own” something.

          •  Kedly   ( @Kedly@lemm.ee ) 
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            810 months ago

            Look man, I get that piracy isnt an ethically clean solution, but the current state of legal digital media is nowhere near ethically clean either, and I’m far more likely to root for a person than I am for a corporation. Especially since its because of corporations that the digital ownership sphere is so fucked

      •  018118055   ( @018118055@sopuli.xyz ) 
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        10 months ago

        I will gladly take a position of moral superiority, because copyright has evolved from a very limited monopoly, intended to encourage creativity while balancing public access, into a licence for corporations to seek rent.

        So, call it stealing if you like, I will sleep well tonight regardless.

        • You’re taking a thing that costs money, for free. I don’t see how it’s anything other than stealing.

          If you go to a theme park, and they want $20 for you to enter, and you decide you don’t want to pay, you’ll be in violation of their rules. Those that did pay will leave the park at the end of the day with a great experience, but with no presumption of ownership of the park. This is analogous to piracy by copying a movie. You didn’t want to pay the entrance fee, so you found a way to have the same enjoyment for free. The people that paid for their media, however shitty the licensing agreement is, received the agreed upon service with no presumption of ownership.

          I’m not here to defend streaming services or crappy licensing deals, but to pretend that it’s not stealing, gaslighting everyone here into following your train of thought, is the definition of unearned moral superiority. You’re not entitled to free media.

  • Those Ads at the beginning of legitimate copies of DVDS and movies, really bugged me, like why are you annoying the people who actually bought the product!? Also the people downloading stuff online seemed cool in those videos so I think the ads had the opposite effect a lot of the time.

  • I don’t really understand the gender difference thing, because I would think that in general it comes down to understanding what “ownership” is and that it has been taken from us, replaced with “licensing” where we have to buy the same movie every 10 years on a new format, and now that streaming is THE format, companies have made The Producers real, where they can make a whole movie, shitcan it, and get a tax break. We’re dealing with items we’ve paid for being removed from our digital storage boxes, because the “rights ran out.” It’s wild, because it used to be that you bought a movie and it didn’t matter that the rights ran out you could still watch your fucking movie in your own home. Same for old video games. If you have old copies of Grand Theft Auto, you can still listen to the great soundtrack, because they hadn’t stripped the music they lost licensing for out of the new copies.

    I mean, going back to when the music companies were suing music fans for downloading music, the RIAA sued Limewire for so much that if the max payout was given to every rightsholder for all the piracy going on, that it would be a bill larger than the amount of money that actually existed.[1]

    When the fines for all piracy that exists would be bigger than the amount of money that exists, its clear that the system is fucking broken and has been.

    Nobody respects copyright, and that started when Disney fucked us all over with the Mickey Mouse Protection Act in the 1990’s.

    The rightsholders did this to themselves by making it increasingly draconian.

    When cops are playing copyrighted music when they’re being filmed so people can’t post it online without it being auto-removed for having copyrighted music in it, things are flat out fucked and everybody knows it.

    It’s akin to living the end stages of the Soviet Union with Hypernormalization. Everything is totally fucked, but everyone is running around trying to pretend that nothing has changed and everything is fine.

    For citizens who get nothing but working themselves to death and taxes that do nothing for them, piracy is one of those small “fuck you”'s that we can give to the rich.


    1. “The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) estimates that filesharing website LimeWire owes it over $72 trillion dollars (£46 trillion) in damages. … Given that the combined wealth of the entire planet is around $60 trillion (£38 trillion), the RIAA likely has no hope of securing this in damages, but believe this is what it is owed, reports Computerworld.com.” ↩︎

  •  Wahots   ( @Wahots@pawb.social ) 
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    5810 months ago

    We only started pirating after Amazon refused to let us play movies we paid for because our hardware was too old for their DRM. It was a 2014 PC made of recycled parts. At the time, it was less than 10 years old. We pirated the same movie and realized it was easier to find, higher quality, and surprise, surprise, capable of playing on a PC we kept out of the landfill.

    When I see anti piracy measures that punish people that don’t pirate, such as massive performance hits or privacy violating features, it makes me want to pirate more.

    • I rented a car to do Uber with while I apply for jobs, and the car is an electric. They had no gas powered cars available.

      It is such a pain in the ass. I’ve only had it for a couple of days, but so far I’ve spent 2.5 hours today waiting for charge, and about 5 hours driving passengers.

      I’m ready. I want to download a car. Just need someone to point me in the right direction.

  • It poses a significant challenge to creative economies worldwide, costing industries billions annually.

    Other studies found, that piracy actually increases sales, offsetting the (always oversestimated) loss of revenue.

    So, no, that’s a lie.

    •  jkrtn   ( @jkrtn@lemmy.ml ) 
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      4210 months ago

      The real challenge to creative economies are the billionaires sucking all the profit from album sales or deleting television shows from the face of the earth for a tax writeoff.

    •  blindsight   ( @blindsight@beehaw.org ) 
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      9 months ago

      Agreed. I copied that exact quote to see if someone called it out already. Also this one:

      educational messages tend to try and educate the consumer on the moral and economic damage of piracy.

      Citation fucking needed.

      As an anecdotal example, I pay for Netflix, Spotify, Prime, and Kindle Unlimited (and CBC Gem partly through taxes), I regularly buy videogames and ebooks (and pay for a library with taxes), and I buy phone apps. I’m paying as much as I comfortably can for media in various forms.

      I also pirate TV/film content, books, games, apps, operating systems, etc. A lot.

      But about half the TV/film piracy is content I have already paid to get streaming access to simply because it’s easier to pirate than figure out which service it’s on, and the other half is mostly freely available on YouTube at garbage quality.

      The content industry, net everything, is getting all the cash out of me that they ever will. Piracy has 0 net effect on my media spending; I’d just consume different content, content at a lower quality, spend more time on Where To Stream, and get books from the library a bit more often.

  • Piracy is a service issue. Give people the option to stream all of their media with an option to download for the nerds, and sell it at a reasonable price, you will hurt piracy. Splintering all media up into a thousand streaming services and implementing black box licensing agreements is what pushes people to piracy.

    •  adr1an   ( @anzo@programming.dev ) 
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      1010 months ago

      Also, the number of seeds are a good measure for popularity of media that one might not had in their radar at all. Meanwhile, platforms try to push all sort of content only because they produced it, recommendation algorithms are needed (and insufficient), because there a huge load of crap being produced at such a high rate…

  •  Lvxferre   ( @lvxferre@mander.xyz ) 
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    3410 months ago

    I have two hypotheses to explain the gender gap.

    1. The effectiveness of the threats is inversely proportional to the tech expertise of the person being threatened. And your typical woman knows less about files, piracy, internet and the likes than your typical man.

    If this hypothesis is true, then splitting cohorts based on tech expertise should show a smaller gap between men and women.

    2. Society trains women and men to react differently to threat. In simple words: men are expected by society to fight back, while women are expected to passively accept the threat and play along.

    If this hypothesis is true, you should be able to see and measure the different answers in other situations that don’t involve piracy.


    With that said, “perhaps” those anti-piracy messages would be more effective if they didn’t rely on bullshit, to the point that sounds a lot like “I expect the viewers of this message to be both tech-illiterate and gullible”.

  •  Allero   ( @Allero@lemmy.today ) 
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    2710 months ago

    The conclusion doesn’t follow the study.

    Threatening messages decrease piracy by women by over 50%, while increasing piracy by men by 18%.

    So, unless there are three times as many male pirates as female, those messages are effective at reducing piracy.