It’s fine to pirate every piece of media. From books, to movies, to music, to textbooks, to newspapers, to my own comments online.
Information and art is meant to be shared and enjoyed. Pay walling a distraction from reality does nothing but make reality worse.
Soooo people shouldn’t get paid for taking time to create books, movies, music, textbooks, newspapers?
Eh, there’s a difference between compensation for work and using laws and legislation to sew up something tighter than a cats arse for personal exploitation
I would argue that someone saying “every piece of media” doesn’t care about that distinction.
That’s a completely different statement
What about people who need money to not only survive but to continue making art? What separates art from, say, coding, as a form of labor that is not worth compensation? Is an artist’s work not worthy of adequate compensation?
This is why concepts like UBI would be so transformative to society.
Imagine a world where no one had to choose between creating and surviving. Where writers and artists and coders and musicians could just make beautiful things and give them to the world for nothing.
Something interesting I’d like to point out, the videogame Mindustry is open source and copyleft (I think either GPL or AGPL). You can get a build off GitHub or FlatHub completely for free. However there is a Steam version with Steam multiplayer and achievements as well which is $9.99 USD on Steam, estimated ownership is around 846.7k [1], the price hasn’t always been $9.99, but assuming that isn’t the case the game has made around $8 million, I haven’t taken out Valve’s cut and I don’t know how much tax they’re paying but that’s pretty good. It could be a lot higher if all of the FlatHub and GitHub users paid for their copy. I initially discovered the game on FlatHub, loved it and now have it on Steam. I wouldn’t have bought the game if I hadn’t tried it for free.
It feels counterintuitive that freeloaders can help with sales, but consider a physical artwork like a painting. People don’t tend to buy these things without seeing them first, and seeing it is experiencing, so there’s very little benefit to buying it, but people do anyway to support the artist, because they want more.
People who can’t pay experiencing their creative work doesn’t take anything away from them. Complain about the lack of funding for art instead
What if code should also be shared freely?
You mean like GitHub and source forge?
🤣
Don’t do work that requires uploading your work to the internet before being paid if you’re not okay with some people experiencing it for free.
Agreed. Once you start blocking culture to only those who can afford it you start losing culture once it becomes unprofitable.
Isn’t a car a form of art since it was designed? So you should steal a car too?
Come on.
I’m not an advocate for unlimited pirating, but this is a poor analogy. Stealing is taking something from someone, as in the previous owner no longer possesses that item. Pirating digital media is not taking anything from anyone, as it’s digital and thus still exists. This is why the courts do not call pirating theft, they call it copyright infringement.
I disagree completely.
What about pure digital releases? Where 100% of the profits come from sales?
My analogy was spot on, and I don’t care if all your feelings are hurt so it’s downvoted.
Stealing is stealing, stop trying to justify it in the name of art and sharing.
Textbooks don’t only get digital releases. If everyone started to pirate it all the time, the author would not make any money at all.
Keep lying to yourselves about why you steal things.
To preface this, I do agree it’s not morally correct to pirate. At BEST it’s morally neutral, and usually it’s not even that. I don’t know why people think they’re entitled to another person’s work without paying just because it’s “art”. They’re not.
However…
I completely disagree that your analogy is spot on. If I have zero plans to ever buy a certain car, but then one day decide to just steal it to see if it’s fun to drive, that car can no longer be sold to somebody else and the dealership or whatever just lost a lot of money.
On the other hand, if I have no plans to ever buy a game, but decide to pirate it to see if it’s actually fun, the developers don’t lose money from that. I never would have bought it in the first place, and they can still sell it to others because I didn’t actually take it from them.
That’s the difference. Now, if I had already planned on buying it but decided, “nah I’ll just pirate it instead”, then I would agree they’re losing out on a potential sale. That’s still different from losing a car though, because the dealership isn’t only losing a potential sale, they’re also losing an item in limited supply that takes physical time and labor to make (as opposed to just fabricating another Steam key).
Ok, I do agree with your updated statement, that if you pirate something to see how it is then buy it, that you’re still buying the item and giving money to the creators.
But the sentiment in here seems to be that “art and creation should be shared among all for free”.
I mean, maybe it should be. Maybe the government should be paying artists instead like somebody else suggested somewhere. Idk, it’s an interesting topic. But that’s in these peoples ideal world that we clearly do not live in. I am in complete agreement that, pirating all forms of art being the morally just thing to do (like the very first commenter suggested), is very incorrect. At least in our timeline it is.
Yep, stealing is stealing. This mob mentality exists on self-declared righteous people on Lemmy.
I can even totally understand ‘I pirate because I don’t have moneh, it’s not the right thing to do but alas!’
At least the thief acknowledges, unlike these Lemmy people.
100%, the self-righteousness on here is astounding
Textbooks don’t only get digital releases. If everyone started to pirate it all the time, the author would not make any money at all.
Maybe you should start looking into academic publishing and the amount of money authors get for their work in this field. Spoiler: It’s a laughable fraction of the book prices.
Reading comprehension is key. I wasn’t advocating anything, I was simply pointing out that even the law disagrees with you. Pirating digital goods is not theft, it is copyright infringement.
Oh ok! So it means it’s not a crime right?
🙄
Where did I say in any of my comments that it isn’t a crime? Proving my comment above about reading comprehension.
Lmao, ok dude, keep moving goalposts
if you want to build a copy of my car be my guest
The audacity from woke people.
Pretty cool move. If I come across one of his games that interests me, I’ll gladly buy it.
Based jakito
Based.
Makes me wanna buy the game even though I know literally nothing about it.
Note to PC gamers: If you have anything with RTX on it, you are not broke.
Gotta love this quote from the article: “piracy doesn’t mean a lost sale if the person pirating the game couldn’t afford it in the first place.”
I’ve seen this happen time and time again with people I know who simply couldn’t pay even a single dollar for a game, and had no other options available. They deserve to experience culture and entertainment just as much as the rest of us.
The original owner of Galactic Civilization 2 basically said the same thing. He also wrote the Gamers’ Bill of Rights.
So of course GalCiv3 did the exact opposite, removed a key feature (milky way map) that was in the first 2 so they could sell it as an overpriced DLC, and made as many DLCs as they could (though not nearly as bad as Paradox or EA).
I don’t know who owns Stardock Entertainment now, if the owner sold it, sold out, or got hostile takeovered, but now they’re just like all the other big corporate assholes.
The enshitification is a very real thing unfortunately.
To be fair, piracy does drive down sales, as some of the people who would otherwise buy the game do pirate it.
Even still, word of mouth is a great way to compensate for that effect; also, culture really shouldn’t be reserved to those who have the means.
To be fair, piracy does drive down sales, as some of the people who would otherwise buy the game do pirate it.
Do we know that for sure? If games don’t have demos, and don’t have pirated copies available, how do you know that people who would have otherwise pirated it are just going to go ahead and buy it?
Also, isn’t the opposite true? If pirated copies of games are available, won’t some people treat them as demos and if they like the game then they will end up buying it to support the developer and to get official updates for the game?
It’s generally not an accurate statement to say that piracy drives down sales, at least when you look at overall measurements. You’re definitely correct in assuming pirates want to support developers (and media creators in general) that they enjoy the works of, because pirates are by far the largest purchasers of content compared to traditional content purchasers
Why doesn’t he just put the game up for free as an option then?
I don’t think Steam supports any sort of sliding scale system and they have a price parity rule which would be broken by offering it elsewhere
You can offer the game elsewhere for less / free, you just can’t sell steam keys for less than you sell them on steam.
Piracy is illegal, so a lot of people will still abstain from downloading the game for free.
If you provide it for free on official distribution channels, your revenue drops drastically.
Is it illegal if the creator is saying they’re ok with you getting it for free?
Yes, it’s still illegal.
As it’s illegal to dumpster dive food even though you have permission from the supermarket owner.
These devs fuck
Gangster dev
It all depends on your income, man. If you are well off you have no excuse to not pay for anything. If you live in Vietnam then by all means all software becomes suddenly free and free of guilt.
Well he is free to put it under a libre licence anytime.
These sorts of stories are stupid, and pirates love to eat them up because they see it as validation, because one developer is financially independent enough to not go broke if his game doesn’t sell. Most indie devs are not in such a position.
If he truly thought it was fine to download his game for free, he’d have released it for free in the first place. It’s pretty easy for him to have a chill attitude and say it’s okay to pirate his game after making nearly $100 million on it.
