Companies have already taken multiple sustained attacks against consumers rights so why would consumers care about the companies rights?
It's not your product to design, in this case you don't get to decide how it's presented. You also don't get to decide the design of iOS, or how Apple designs its next processor, or what color Stack Overflow's logo is, or the design of Wikipedia, or what resolutions YouTube offers, or what algorithms Google uses in its search product.
Why are a series of 1s and 0s this companies property or that person's property other than because society declares them to be so? If they can declare who owns what then that declaration can change
Edit: For example, if steam boat Willie was still under the copyright laws that existed when it was created, it would be society property now. Because the rules were changed, it's Disney's property. If "property" can be taken from society by companies, then the reverse can happen as well
But for your information, I can and do run userscripts, custom ROMs, jailbroken firmware etc to change the exact sort of thing you spent the second half of your post talking about. You sound like you have a very boring consumerist relationship to technology and the opposite of a hacker ethos.
The entitlement here is the elites, who don't have anything to fear from antitrust legislation and can fundamentally undermine the free market, which allegedly is important to the underlying Ayn Rand undercurrent of this site.
In that context, rebellion/revolt/resistance is a somewhat legitimate choice by some points of view.
Seriously, we just had an election directly related to the over-concentration of media in a few powers, and now we're allowing them to vertically monopolize the delivery of that content.
Which would be a bit... ok... if it was just Mickey Mouse, but the news is fully controlled by oligarchs.
By vertically integrating the internet access, they can censor the only uncontrolled news outlet: the internet.
Either way, it doesn't take an 'entitlement mentality' to prefer paying less for something. That's just good sense. And lots of people do pay for entertainment with the expectation that they can share it with people. Humanity has spent its entire history freely sharing things that grab our social fancy and percolate through our cultural attentions. Just because a business wants to make money doesn't mean they have a right to deny the basic workings of the human brain.
>If you don’t like the terms on which they’re selling the fruits of their labor, don’t buy it.
I'm pretty sure finding someone else who has access to it involves not buying it. Next thing you'll be telling me I have a moral obligation to not watch my sister's Breaking Bad DVD's with her. Or worse: a legal obligation.
If you produce digital music, for instance, it has almost no value if nobody shares it. The decentralization of distribution is exactly the mechanisms one uses to make money off of these things. Your hope is that things go "viral" and that they are shared so prolifically that you'll be able to extract value out of your importance to the network overall, not due to some analogous 'artificial' manufacturing bottleneck like you would with concrete goods.
The argument that it is ok to consume media for free hinges on the fact that it is both efficient and natural human behavior, and that it doesn't undermine the whole-network of value. If the latest Avenger movie makes $1Bn in one week, then it's pretty clear that plenty of value is being extracted from the network, regardless of how many people have not paid to see it. People have no moral obligation to allow a content producer to monopolize all distribution, especially when the rational basis for such level of profit is simply not there. And you can't have it both ways anyway: you can't expect to have "viral" information that people also have to pay to exchange. (Or rather, you can't expect them to be Ok with that.)
The appropriate analogy for that situation would be more like Toyota trying to make it illegal to sell cars that they manufacture without their consent. It would destroy the second-hand market and be highly inefficient for people. If my sister streams her DVDs over the internet to me, all we're doing there is avoiding the coordination costs and being economically efficient. In either case, I pay for my internet access, so I would, in fact, be paying for media that I torrent or share online.
Plenty of people do work which is not properly compensated. I don't get to set the terms of the sale of my intellectual property, as I work in an industry where this has little worth.. and I am an employee.
This is all about power. The power to set prices, the power to use propaganda to change peoples morals, the power to change the law to criminalise minor contract infringements. And as such I get to say, whenever and wherever i can get away with it, fuck their power.
For the very, very minimal amount that's about the sale of the fruits of labour of the creatives and workers producing this entertainment.. Well I wish there was an easier way to compensate them that didn't involve also paying off the distributors.
For example, suppose where you live there is a monopoly ISP-cable conglomerate, you cannot afford to move away, and you are literally unable to consume from any other ISP / cable level provider.
For some content, like watching European soccer in the US, this situation can mean that you are literally prevented from properly paying money to see that content, even though providers exist who can take your money and give you the content. It might even come down to your specific zip code, street, or even apartment building in some cities, where a content provider is case-by-case prevented from selling their content to certain residents purely based on whether a certain ISP has a monopoly on that location.
Telling the consumer to just not watch seems morally hollow in that specific case (which is a really common case). The customer wants to pay, and a third-party wants to give the content, but a rent-seeking middleman that the consumer has no control over (ISP) can limit the customer’s choices. The customer cannot do what the market would suggest and take their business elsewhere to incentivize the services they want, and because of the ubiquitous need for internet connectivity to conduct basic life duties, totally boycotting the monopoly ISP is functionally not an option. (Really, it would not be reasonable to suggest such a drastic option.)
I don’t see any ethical reason why the consumer should just accept being worse off (in terms of planned consumption), since it’s pure rent-seeking and value destruction on the part of the ISP, which the consumer is literally prevented from rejecting.
Many other ISP behaviors are likewise just artificial rent-seeking attempts, to construct artificial tiering, bundling, etc., which the consumer is prevented from “not buying” because the service provider is often literally a monopoly.
I’m just curious if you take an extreme view of this, that the ISPs or monopoly providers “are right” to use their monopoly position to introduce artificial rent-seeking opportunities? And that if a customer must choose between either paying the rent-seeking premium, stealing the content, or not consuming at all, that the customer should accept that the ISP / content provider’s ability to inflict this situation (through what are unequivocally antitrust violations that are just not punished solely because of regulatory capture) does indees mean the consumer just should opt to not consume at all?
Essentially, “because ISPs spend money on regulatory capture, I should accept living a worse life by not consuming at all rather than watching illegally.”
Seems like big word for something which is not food, water, life saving drug or some such. Now people are free to consider entertainment as basic human right. But similarly other powerful people/institution feel free to take away more fundamental things from helpless people.
From where I am, government is more than happy to offer free entertainment produced by private parties while feel no obligation to clean up almost sewer quality water running through taps of millions of homes.
I am not convinced by your reply because it tries to flip it around and blame the consumer (the victim of regulatory capture and ISP monopolies or oligopolies) just because the thing they are being deprived of “is not food.”
No part of this is related to whether something is a human right — that’s completely unrelated.
The problem is why should I, as a consumer, agree to accept a worse life in any way, even a minor way based on what is convenient for a corporation acting to ensure regulatory capture and ensure monopolistic or oligopolistic conditions within which it can unilaterally control what a consumer is allowed to consume.
I see this as a limiting factor on freedom of speech that will only continue to get worse if the market is further fragmented.
Think about it like this: a comedian tells a joke that offends someone. But the people who get offended aren't the audience of that comedian, and wouldn't have seen the comedian's show anyway. Should the comedian worry at all about these people boycotting the show if they never have and never will buy tickets anyway?
Ending the devil's advocate, if these companies want to completely control popular culture and change the definition of society, they have to understand that memes (not the Internet kind, the real life kind) spread until they are pervasive. There's a limit to how much Disney can force Avengers into our cultural identity then demand payment for it. Either Avengers becomes a cultural meme and spreads virally, or you can keep people from seeing it unless you control the experience end-to-end and only have it become a moderate success and only make a moderate amount of money.
Entitled to money for services rendered is differnet than just being entitled to money. They don't think they deserve your money if you don't want to pay. They just don't think you should also get the product.
I seriously doubt the people spending time pirating and watching media would just suddenly take up reading books from the library or maybe sewing. They'd probably spend some money on media.
Not every pirated media is a lost sale. But some of them are.
I know when I sailed the high seas I just ended up forking down money for stuff I couldn't successfully pirate (multiplayer games and movies in theatres).
That analysis maybe works in the context of an individual piece of content from a single company, but it is a lot more shaky when applied to multiple pieces of content from multiple companies.
For instance, suppose someone wants to watch a movie tonight. Their first choice is not yet available on any streaming platform they subscribe to, nor is it available on any of the rental platforms they have reasonable access to. It's only available for purchase at $25.
If they cannot pirate it they aren't likely to cancel their movie night. They are likely to move on to their second or third choice that is available on one of their streaming services or is rentable.
If they pirate their first choice, then the company that provides that movie loses nothing because, as you note, they were not going to get the money anyway. The company providing their second choice however does lose out on the sale they would have made if there was no piracy.
(Well, actually, the company that makes their first choice loses nothing that night. If they could not have pirated it, they probably would not have given up on watching it. They would more likely have postponed it to a later movie night after it does become available for rental or streaming).
Continuing with the epidemiological metaphor, there are several possible vectors for the content to spread, and the prevalence of each depends on the particular circumstances of specific hosts or communities of hosts. For example, if the vector of "Alice advising Bob to consume it on subscription service X" is effective in a particular community (and this effectiveness obviously depends on several different parameters), then piracy wouldn't be an issue there. But if all such legal vectors are ineffective in that community, while the content is still very potent in its memetic properties, then it will still spread out, in one of several forms of alternative less legal vectors.
To paraphrase John Gilmore's famous quote about the internet, society treats inconvenient content providers as if they weren't there and routes around them, creating alternative distribution methods.
There is no single truth here and I think that you are being overly offensive in saying that, by advocating for a different set of social rights, the OP is a sociopath. By the same token, any civil disobedience should be treated as sociopathy, no?
He made no such claim. You have to foundation from which to argue he believes this.
> OP is the textbook definition of a sociopath.
Blatantly lying about what someone else believes to paint them in a negative light is much more sociopathic than pirating something.
What a ridiculous stretch of logic.
On the contrary the idea that people's lives/property should be threatened (e.g. Kim Dotcom, ThePirateBay, etc.) for interfering, vaguely, in multinational conglomerates attempts to prevent the copying of 1s and 0s is entirely sociopathic. Something that most corporations end up behaving as.
He's not buying it. He just got it for free. Problem solved.