this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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It’s response to a complaint. Vote with your dollar. Just as with voting in elections, you don’t get to complain when you’re not participating in any capacity that has an impact on the result.
Vote with your dollar means rich people get way more votes.
<insert explanation of the fundamental contradiction vetween capitalism and democracy here> ;p
Same way a sales tax is a tax that disproportionately affects the poor.
Not necessarily. There would be no point to someone paying multiple times for content. Rich people do, however, get to overwhelmingly produce the content which is exactly why it’s most important to support creators and pay for their content. If you want to build a meritocracy within a capitalist society, your dollars are the most important means of change.
Looks at Nintendo that sells the same game from 1985 to it's customer base again and again every new console.
Looks back in history at Blockbuster, a company that would sell someone the same content multiple times.
Looks at any rent-to-own store that effectively charges 2x - 10x the price of their content for the mere privilege of taking longer to buy it.
Looks to me that people pay for content multiple times anytime a corporation can get away with it.
The rest of your statement is at best a very naïve approach to capitalism.
Those are dishonest comparisons. The OP was saying that rich people get more votes. None of those things you mentioned are a vote for content. They are votes for the mechanisms of the content and, guess what, people vote for them every time by buying them, rich or not. Nintendo selling the same title for a different system is something people do whether they’re rich or not. A rich person doesn’t buy multiple copies of a re-released game for a single Switch. A rent-to-own store doesn’t deal with movies or music or content, they deal with goods.
My last statement isn’t naive. It’s literally what capitalism is. Ingesting content is not a need. We’re not talking about Nestle buying up all the food companies. We’re talking about completely optional products.
I bristle a bit at being accused of dishonesty and I think that limiting the conversation to the money spent in the production of the original work and wholesale dismissal is distribution is unnecessarily restrictive - it's not like capitalism is a system limited to the original production of media.
That said, I think we can agree that it's worthwhile to funnel money into direct payment to artists whenever possible. Middlemen like the record studios offer terrible value, seeming to exist solely to siphon away as much value as possible.
It’s not unnecessarily restrictive. It was the entire point of discussion. Opening that up to more general straw men does nothing to further that discussion. Bristle all you want but I can see no other reason to ignore the point and argue against things that were never mentioned other than to be dishonest.
It’s ludicrous that people here can’t be honest with themselves. Piracy is theft, of one form or another. No, it’s not the same thing as stealing a physical object but no one is pretending it is. The gymnastics all over this sub are childish and tiring.
Dude, check your assumptions. I haven't pirated anything in at least a decade. I'm just an IT guy that signed up for Lemmy and puruses the 'all' page.
I do think there's an excellent case for the moral application of piracy in many situations.
Large corporations often acquire their catalog of legally protected ideas through the systemic exploitation of people. If the people who did the work have been paid every cent they'll ever get for their work, and the work itself has recouped the cost to make it, then I see no moral imperative for the work to make another dime of revenue. Obviously that's not a black and white issue and obviously piracy often does hurt smaller creators, so care and reason are called for here.
On the flip side sharing is core part of the basic human experience and there's a great argument to be made that with the advent of computers (which have both reduced the technical barriers to access tools to create, and have expanded the possibilities of what can be created), copyright law is too restrictive and is actually impedes the creation of new art, running against the fundamental point of copyright in the first place. Since the average person does not have Disney money for lawyers and lobbyists piracy often seems like the sensible way to for the common person to push back.
I also think that piracy can hurt people who absolutely do not deserve it. But I'm not going to pretend a complex societal issue is as simple 'law good, law breakers bad'.
I never made any assumptions about you. If you can’t even be bothered to read what I’ve written, there’s no point in responding to you.
Do I not qualify as part of people here by virtue of this is where we're talking? I suspect when you wrote that you meant to include me, but after my reply it was no longer convenient for you to lump me in with everyone else by that statement.
Maybe you'll clarify who you meant by that, or maybe not. In either case, I wish you a great day. Thank you for the discussion in good faith.