Good comment, it was very funny to see how people desperately try to find moral justification for pirating media A but not B. "It's apples to oranges, you see, there are less letters in the NYT article than in the book and they are rendered differently, so it is ok to pirate their work. I did nothing wrong!" :)
It is actually pirating content by companies for humongous profit, or pirating by individual human beings for free access to culture and entertainment, oftentimes for content one has already paid for, but rendered inaccessible by megacorporations.
As for movies/tv show/music makers, let’s just say most people in the software engineering business would look at their numbers and count their lucky stars that they are not in the movie/tv show/music business.
(It is also true that excessive copyright lengths have removed access to content that the public should have a right to).
The movie/tv show and music business can keel over and die tomorrow - it wouldn’t affect the value of art produced by humans at all. I see those more as exploitative leeches than as contributing anything positive.
If only piracy would actually harm these businesses but alas as often demonstrated it has zero effect on their bottom line, if anything it increases their profits.
It seems pretty natural to me. People generally have less problem with stealing a candy bar than stealing a car. (Consider the cost to produce a NYT article vs the cost to produce a Hollywood movie). I don't think the stealing-vs-pirating analogy is perfect, but it's related.
There's no way to get your money back if you didn't like the content. If they don't want their articles to be read for free then they should keep them out of my view. And certainly not use clickbaity headlines. Information can be copied and they should accept it, or change their business/distribution model.
So if I went to a cinema and didn't like the movie, I should be entitled for a return, right? Or if I went into a museum and didn't like the art displayed there?
If you are advocating for a free for all libertarian dystopia, well, I have some bad news for you - they never work.
> So if I went to a cinema and didn't like the movie, I should be entitled for a return, right?
Not being able to un-see a movie and get your time and money back is one side of the coin. The other side is that information can be copied.
Both sides suck for one of the parties. There's no reason why one of them gets it their way, especially if it requires a contrived legal framework while the other way would require nothing at all.
Your personal opinion on the matter has little weight here.
It doesn't matter what you think you're paying for or should be paying for, the fact of the matter is that you're paying for the effort people put in bringing that to you. So you are, whether you want to be or not.
"Information can be copied and they should accept it" <- I was referring to this line. This basically means that OP thinks that any intellectual property should be free for everyone. This means that probably half of humanity (who are currently creating anything with IP) will have to be libertarians, and that can't happen unless all humanity are libertarians. And libertarian society is a dystopia. :)
> This basically means that OP thinks that any intellectual property should be free for everyone.
Incorrect. Many intellectual property has a certain merit that can be demonstrated before it is consumed. E.g. "This piece of software allows you to create 3d models". On the other hand, an article with headline "Will new batteries allow 10x more energy storage?" does not tell me anything.
I wonder what the reaction of some of the people who browse this forum would be if the output of their careers were so commonly pirated. Somehow, I think most think that this argument doesn't apply.
I’d be pretty delighted. I’m paid for getting projects done, not for keeping hold on some copyrighted code. I want all my code to be open sourced, and reused.
