75% of the anti-piracy discussions I see rarely blame companies like Nintendo or Disney and always try to talk about how piracy is immoral, and you should feel “dirty” for doing it. My question is why do people seem to hate those who pirate more than the bad practices of mega-corporations or the fact that they don’t want to preserve their media?
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I blame the “piracy is stealing” advertising/propaganda. It was super effective, given that we all remember it.
Editing to add one of my favorite videos in the other direction, Copying is Not Theft.
I don’t remember ever seeing such an advertisement in my life.
YOU WOULDN’T DOWNLOAD A CAR
I totally would
In this day, I’m pretty sure the entirety of the middle class and below would if they could.
and then download a house
That “you wouldn’t download a car” became the meme while the ad itself said “you wouldn’t steal a car” drives home exactly how effective these ads were at conflating the two.
NOT ONLY WOULD I DOWNLOAD A CAR, I WOULD THEN WORK ON A WAY TO LET EVERYONE DOWNLOAD CARS
Sharing is caring ♥️
You’ve never seen this? Never heard “home taping is killing music” or “don’t copy that floppy”?
No to all of those. I don’t remember ever seeing a floppy. Oldest media formats I remember using are cds and cassettes. And that was in elementary school.
ig the piracy is theft advertising was more of a 90s thing that died down in the 2000s if those are your examples?
Yeah, I guess so. Best I can recall, most people I knew were either avid pirates or casually saw it as low-level criminal activity by the early 2000s.
Propaganda works.
The put out a lot of propaganda saying that copying files is stealing. They point to intellectual property rights laws as if that means intellectual property is justified because of the existence of laws.
Ignorant idiots who can’t think for themselves will always follow the narrative that is forced down their throat.
See also “The war on drugs”. The majority of the people who will demonise you for choosing to use “illegal” substances will also be smashing their livers with alcohol which is more detrimental to both themselves and society than a lot of other drugs on a weekly or often daily basis.
Just because it is legal they feel like they are fine to not do their own independent research into what these things actually do to them and how fucking addictive they are.
They’re just outsourcing their ethics.
I still see people parroting these narratives about stuff like weed even after it has been legalized. Some people are too far down the propaganda rabbit hole.
Man, i love Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale. I’m always happy seeing it referenced.
I feel like I could probably use that one reference in every other negative thread about the world these days, great game though!
There’s propaganda, definitely. Also, there are people who simply don’t care what they watch. They’ll just open Netflix and watch whatever they see on the home screen. It’s hard for them to understand why I might wanna watch some Iranian movie from the 80s.
People buy into the BS sold by companies, they eat it all up without thinking twice about it. It’s easier to point fingers at each other than at companies when companies are paying so much money to attack end-users.
Its fanboy/girlism.
If you pirate content from their favorite author/artist/producer/whatever, basically all of their screeching comes down to a hysterical emotional response that you are hurting a person or group that they worship as God.
They just learn rhetoric to justify their emotions as a side effect, a consequence of wanting to be able to argue against the bad mean people that are hurting their favorite creatives.
They are naive, ignorant or misinformed, immature… usually believing in some kind ‘just world’ type worldview where everything is fair and square actually if you just follow the rules.
They don’t understand that the actual ‘losses’ from piracy are far, far smaller than whatever the RIAA or game studios say it is.
They don’t understand that the people who actually create or perform the art basically get paid a tiny fraction of what their labels or corporate overlords make.
They don’t understand that some people are actually poor, and the poor deserve art as well.
They don’t understand that when a reasonable cost forma product with reasonable ownership rights exist, a great, great many will prefer a streamlined but slightly costly method over a complex but monetarily costless method.
They don’t understand that you don’t really own anything which you can’t use or view or listen to as you please without relying on some proprietary other system which may just poof that ability out of existence one day, without refunding you.
It’s because they are paying money for something and you’re getting a better deal. See that’s not fair. Same reason vegans hate on omnivores - they’ve taken the high road and the benefits are small while the cost is high. They tell themselves that their money is going to the artists. And if you believe that, then piracy is harming artists in a very direct way.
When Netflix was just in, their subscribers got the better deal. But currently, tech companies are doing their best to squeeze customers dry for every cent.
Tech corps made the deal bad, piracy didn’t change
Meanwhile, Steam is raking it in by continuing to offer a better product than piracy. The Steam Deck is making that even more true; it’s so much more convenient to have games in the Steam library than try to keep a repack updated with new patches/content.
I just realized… steam is why I stopped pirating
It’s law and order with a bit of “thou shall not steal”. There’re people who never question the root cause.
Some people think that bootlicking will make their own pitiful lives better.
I think piracy is immoral but I still partake in it and I don’t hate anyone for doing so.
It’s like eating meat.
Eating animals is much worse than piracy. The livestock industry is far more destructive.
The point was that both are morally wrong and I still keep doing it.
Right, but pirating Disney-owned IP is more moral than paying for it. Disney is the number 1 company in the world for lobbying for copyright over-reach. Every dollar that goes to Disney pays for lobbyists who will continue to push for life-of-author + 90+ years, because life-of-author plus 70 years just isn’t enough time to control our shared cultural heritage.
Similarly for Nintendo and software piracy.
Paying for Disney/Nintendo media is immoral.
Many think streaming services went more expensive because of piracy ( less people paying for same content = content price needs to be higher, where I believe it is other way around (higher price for less content = more pirates).
The market of distribution of films and series is just fucked. The fight with competitors using exclusive content leads to worst way of distribution since company with exclusive content has monopoly of that content. Streaming services should not be the one owning the content but should be in competition with other distributors offering the same content.
I think the politics have forgotten that we need at least social capitalism if we not want to create cyberpunk dystopia.
- sunzu2 ( @sunzu2@thebrainbin.org ) 3•5 months ago
Bootlickers…
Because they’re consoomers. Consoomers don’t like people who supposedly threaten their product that they shall consoom later.
And consoomers don’t want to make the hand that feeds them angry so they’ll buy into any and every lie that’s been pitched for years about piracy.