Pirates are thus “free riders” to the social contract.
I think you are making the mistake of applying social contracts that can work well on a person to person level to person vs corporation situations. With the latter, one party has way more leverage than the other. On top of that corporations have proven again and again that they will mislead, lie to you and abuse you to the extent permissible by law, or even more if they think it's lucrative to so. On a person to person level that would be a very toxic relationship. They certainly didn't uphold classical inter-personal social contracts, so why should you?
Genuine question, did you fully read the article before commenting here?
The problem here is probably that most folks can’t separate what “is” and what “ought” to be. For example you’re discussing how corporations behave despite it being wholly irrelevant to the question of whether or not piracy is immoral. The argument is one of “oughts” and you’re trying to talk in terms of “is”, despite the gaping crevasse separating the two of them (Hume's Guillotine).
This isn’t where ethics is ambiguous or debated; it’s very obviously immoral to pirate, for a whole host of reasons, some of which I’ve already mentioned. From there you surely can concoct scenarios where a baby would die if it doesn’t hear a Metallica album or whatever, but the general point will stand.
In some kind of perfect world there would be no need for violence. Yet we live in a complex and ambiguous world, where the widely accepted moral view that killing is a bad thing is sometimes the "right" thing to do. Or would you argue the Ukrainian people should just roll over because the social contract says killing is bad? My point is, I don't see how the notion that piracy is bad in a world we don't live in helps this discussion. To me it feels more like an argument one could use to demand people stop doing this immoral thing now.
by the law as media companies would wish us to understand it, this is piracy. but when and by whom was a contract broken during this chain of events? i shared the content with my friend, but my purchase of the DVD wasn't conditional upon any agreement not to, so it couldn't have been me who broke a contract. was the contract broken by the person at the garage sale who sold the DVD without verifying that the recipient wouldn't pass it on to another recipient who would then duplicate it? if so, doesn't that same logic imply the DVD manufacturer broke a contract? if this is how you imagine the contract to function, it would seem the existence of piracy _anywhere_ in this chain means that the entire industry is criminal.
this isn't a hypothetical, btw. there actually is a Bebop DVD out there with a chain of custody that complex (actually more complex by now).
There are other gray areas related to property and copyright. This is not one of them.
You seem convinced that your system of values are the same set everyone else has. That doesn’t make for a useful argument.
The post states that piracy isn’t stealing and you agree.
There must be some other thing in your mind that is equivalent.
We've agreed it's not stealing. We've agreed that not all piracy is immoral, for some definition of immoral.
I think we can agree that this specific tort does not apply.
Which specific thing in the social contract, some simple verb such as "stealing" are you equating piracy with. Then we'll have something concrete to discuss I think.
Also that's not what trespass means. You don't "deprive" someone of their land when you walk on it without permission, and you don't "deprive" someone of their song when you pirate it.
Re trespass, that’s not what the specific tort you referred to means. A chattel is a moveable form of property. You’re talking about the colloquial version of trespass. Happy to talk about that conception of it.
Is the idea of trespass the specific thing you feel is being violated in the social contract? If not, what is?
So when you look at a comment that clearly a) is intended to diminish your position and b) seems to completely ignore what you've actually written, it's not "perceived hostility" it's simply bad faith engagement.
You still have not answered the very simple question though, and i might be a bit slow off the mark but i don’t see it answered elsewhere in this thread.
A lack of trust is not a reasonable reason to refuse to state a single verb or noun. Trust isn’t really a part of this - we are strangers on the internet.
I don’t believe that you are engaging with the discussion honestly because this is an extremely simple question to answer.
I believe this is because you have realised that you cannot defend the position you have taken.
It’s been an interesting discussion.
I just don't trust you.
It goes entirely against how humans think, strangling creativity and innovation. An artist is harmed far more when they're forced to spend years in court, debating whether their chord progression is too similar to a song written by someone who's been dead for 50 years.
Have you ever actually published anything for others to purchase?
So, evidence please. :)
Hopefully you'll be able to understand the world a bit more and contribute meaningfully to it when you're older.
Best of luck. :)
I suspect you are either not proud of your published work, or providing a link or examples would diminish rather than strengthen your position in this debate. It's easy to argue about morals and social contracts if you've published a literary work; less so if, for example, it winds up being a fan DnD extension module on DriveThruRPG.
Someone is querying your credentials to learn about you, where you're coming from, what perspective you have, what skin you have, so to speak, in the game. Dodging behind some notion of having to "earn" your credentials when you have taken a very strong and contrarian position is disingenuous.
What you must earn is my respect, and the person I replied to has lost that.
I've observed there's a lot of them about.
Unlike say... someone making claims but unable to provide evidence.
> To throw out intellectual property is to throw out art itself.
Art is older than intellectual property.
"To throw out intellectual property" wouldn't stop anybody to continue making art, it would at most challenge the way we build an economy around it.
Finally you've raised what could be an interesting point. :)
Is there usefulness in the quantity of film / television / music being created today?
Would we be better off as a society if there was... less?
Maybe turning off the fountain of crap would be an improvement? :)
Either way, it's not up to you to decide utility arbitrarily. Besides, if the art is bad, why are you pirating it in the first place? The problem is that people want the art too much, and are willing to break the social contract in order to obtain it.
That's a bold claim. My opinion is different though.
> Besides, if the art is bad, why are you pirating it in the first place?
Why are you accusing me of doing so? Are you basing it upon my not having the same viewpoint as you?
Umm you do realize that some of the greatest works of art were created LONG before "IP" was a thing right? The patronage system did pretty well....
But you don't seem to value art...?
Since you seem to be a stickler for rules and agreements I'd urge you to re-read the guidelines for posting comments on this site (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) as looking through this thread you are definitely flirting with the edges of them.
I'm not sure why piracy is the internet hill you've decided to die on regarding arguments but I'm going to choose to disengage, give zero cares to your views on my morality, and use my own best judgement on when it's moral to pirate or not.
Besides, nobody asked you to reply to me in the first place. You engaging/disengaging was always at your own impulse. Nobody was requesting you say anything at all, so returning to that state concerns only you.
Maybe start reading a few books about it, or take a class? You're trying to argue that ethics literally does not exist, which is quite a tall order.
>If so, that'd be vigilante justice and still immoral.
Also I don't want to get to off topic, but I want to challenge your premise that vigilante justice is always immoral. (Is it immoral for a parent to punish a child for jaywalking instead of calling the police?)
And I didn't say it was always immoral, I said it was generally immoral. One should assume "generally" rather than "always"... in general.
At what point does a party become free from the obligations of their social contract with the corporate media company then?
>And I didn't say it was always immoral, I said it was generally immoral. One should assume "generally" rather than "always"... in general.
My apologies, based off your previous comments I assumed you were taking a firm ethical stance here. With that said then, I just want to point out that the claim "vigilante justice is immoral" is far from being ethical consensus among philosophers. (Communitarians vs Forfeiturist)
Ultimately this is outside the scope of our conversation so I'd rather not get hung up on it... the tone of your claim just struck me as oddly bold.
And I am taking a firm ethical stance; it's just not an absolute ethical stance.