Should pirating music/movies/games/etc stay illegal or not?

[Shahad]

'Piracy is wrong and you should feel ashamed.'

What other reason do you need?

You're completely right. I feel awful now. I'll go cheer myself up with an illegally downloaded version of a Disney movie.

[darkwarrior42]

Illegal, sure, but people also need to deal with it in a realistic manner, which includes:

1) Not putting up more barriers that encourage people to pirate. People that can't afford your stuff aren't going to buy it regardless, so stop worrying about them, and start worrying about people who pirate because it's too annoying to deal with your content legally. (Mostly applies to games with obnoxious DRM, but also to certain tv shows and movies based on region issues).

2) Stop equating piracy with physical theft. Piracy is a lost opportunity, not an actual loss. This means you are losing the potential to make money, you are losing control over content you have a legal right to control, and this should be actioned, but it is not the same as losing something you physically made. If I'm not going to buy a copy of your game, then you're no better or worse off with me pirating the game than you are with me just not buying it (and in fact, if I like it and talk about it, you might even be a bit better off).
---Anyone who reads the above paragraph as a justification for piracy is missing the point. Being accurate with what is lost and why it matters is important. If you say "Piracy is theft", you're telling pirates "I'm an idiot and don't understand what you're doing", and there is effectively zero chance they'll listen to or care about anything you say.

3) Make the punishment commensurate to the crime. The RIAA is one of the biggest problems, in my opinion... they're so overtly over the top with what they do that it recasts the entire situation in a Robin Hood-esque "these people deserve to be robbed" perspective, which makes all other forms of piracy seem more acceptable by extension. I sympathize with video game makers who have their games pirated (particularly small companies), and to an extent with tv and movie studies, but when I see people pirating music and the RIAA losing out, my first instinct is to cheer regardless of legality. Change that, and you change a great deal of the culture as well. (Past punishment schemes favored by the RIAA were absurdly over the top... to the point where if you took their "damages" per song shared and applied it to every sone ever shared, their total damages would be many times more than the total amount of money that has ever existed, which makes it difficult to take them seriously even when I ignore all the horrible things they do.)

[Deleted]

Piracy is just a symptom of poor service.

Take Steam for instance. They have plenty of services that actually makes me buy games, instead of pirating them. Be that sales, safe transactions or a very smooth system in which i can purchase it. It also integrates support for me and my friends to play on it.

[Eroginous]

Piracy is just a symptom of poor service.

Take Steam for instance. They have plenty of services that actually makes me buy games, instead of pirating them. Be that sales, safe transactions or a very smooth system in which i can purchase it. It also integrates support for me and my friends to play on it.

Exactly this. Half the reason I've enjoyed playing Wow, Hearthstone, and Diablo 3, is because Blizzard takes security of the services and products they sell very seriously. They put a lot of effort into making sure their servers are the place to play their games. It's nice to know your stuff will always be there, even if you delete the game. You can always come back later when you're into it again. I can't really say the same for many other games. One of my favorite freemium games on Steam is shutting down in July, due to the game not generating enough interest to pay for server costs, despite being one of the most balanced, fun, and addicting pvp games ever made. I think part of the problem was the progression system lacked any real incentive to keep playing the game, and being successful in Magicka: pvp wars requires a degree of teamwork beyond just being on the same side as the other 3 players on your team. I'm going to miss the hell out of that game, and it saddens me that Wow will never be as good a pvp game as I game I played for free.

Contrast this to GTA 5 Online, and it's a cesspool of modding and cheating, completely devaluing any progress players can make. I don't know why I bought the game in the first place (don't like single player GTA anymore) and I can't stand being Online for more than about 15 minutes. That's about the time it takes for someone to start ruining a session with their cheating. If you want to roll around in an armored car and be harder to kill with Bullets, that's cool, I'm all for that. Buy the damn Kuruma or one of the other Armored vehicles and play fair. Don't roll around in a normal car with god mode on, completely ignoring RPGs to the face while you mow everyone down with a mini gun. If I got the drop on you with anything, die and respawn for revenge, like you're fucking supposed to.

/endrant

[Kallisto]

Or maybe everything should be cheaper and more affordable so the masses can enjoy more media more frequently.

In th ways of media everything IS cheaper and affordable prices have been more or less stagnant for 20 years which in real terms due to inflation means that everything is about 30-40% cheaper than back then.

Hell there are critically acclaimed indi games that are not even $10 yet everyone seemed to pirate the fuck out of it. This happens and people wonder why DRM happens (even though DRM has existed since the 70s). Also demos are still around steam, PlayStation store etc have entire catalogues of them. Even though demos are bad for business. Essentially people might say "if I like it I will. Buy it" but the evidence does not support the so called justification.

[satimy]

Your logic is just as bad, imo...
You never intended to buy a ticket to that movie anyway, so who did you harm by sneaking into the movie theater to watch it?

If you truly, under no circumstance, would have bought a ticket to that movie then no, there might have been no lost revenue. It doesn't make it any less of an entitled dick move though. I would never buy this ticket, but damn it I want to watch it so that's what I'll do! If you truly aren't going to buy something, how about don't buy it, don't watch it, and move on with your life? Instead of justifying why you should be able to watch it anyway?

If theres no lost revenue, then theres nothing to even debate because its as if nothing happened.

[nextormento]

Your logic is just as bad, imo...
You never intended to buy a ticket to that movie anyway, so who did you harm by sneaking into the movie theater to watch it?

The cinema house, as you're actually using their premises and consuming/depleting their resources. From spending the time of the folks that guide you to a seat, to slightly deteriorating the fabric of the seats, to the small extra heating/cooling that the room will need, etc.

Your retort is completely devoid of merit: no analogy works if there's a resource to deplete. Copying doesn't consume the resource in any way. The folks holding the rights to a creation don't lose any of their goods.

What the creator sees is no change at all. Not buying and copying yield exactly the same outcome for them as it pertains to their resource: they still have the entirety of the capacity to copy and sell their piece.

You can't lose that which you never had.

Here's a more apt analogy: buildings. Do we ever charge anyone that takes a picture of them? do we charge people that look at them?. No, we don't, because that would be stupid. Architecture being an art, it should be obviously subject to copyright protection. In reality, the plans are protected, but the product isn't. We charge people that copy the design and sell it. We don't charge those that make a scale model in their room.

Which is not to say the protection should not exist. It should. But prosecuting the one that copies stuff, without profiting from it, is ridiculous.

Besides, copying is necessary to start the creative process. No piece exists in a vacuum. Criminalizing the act of copying is damaging to the entire premise of the protection. Because copyright is a privilege granted to ensure society can enjoy creations. If we sever the very starting point of the creative process, copying, society won't ever again have creations.

[Vash The Stampede]

Not always true, some DRM tech is proving too difficult to break. Always online games like Blizzard's games are rarely pirated. The more people pirate, the more companies will invest in DRM and in some cases come out successful.

Blizzards games are mostly online, and not really desirable to pirate an online game. Hasn't stopped some people though. There's plenty of WoW servers, that I know. I haven't checked to see if their other games are pirated.

Right now Denuvo is blocking a number of games from being pirated, but it'll be cracked soon. No copy protection is impossible.

Wait what? Did you miss a "don't" in there?

Nope. You already use a lot of open source software and don't even know it. Just a matter of time before Windows is replaced by Linux. Even applications like Adobe Photoshop will eventually have an open source competitor.

[Super Kami Dende]

while it should stay illegal, I think the fact that copyright infringement can get you more time in Jail than sexual assault to be fucking laughably stupid.

[Slant]

I find it odd that torrenting is considered "piracy" when you don't actually steal anything (you know, take it away from someone).

Oh, but you are. You are stealing (illegally appropriating) yourself the right to reproduce the material in question. Piracy and copyright has never been about merely the act of copying a file on your HDD. It's about the right to copy. Or copyright.

And there is a big movement arguing for a complete removal of the copyright construct. It's a bit radical, but they are thinking outside the box. The current copyright system is having a few problems, especially about the internet and the trackability of their material. Protecting copyright was easy when you were limited to large presses to copy books. It was rather easy to find out who printed the copies and then you could actually shut him down for good. Back in the early days of printing, copyright was a super strong protection mechanism.

Nowadays you can duplicate entire libraries with literally the press of a button. Anyone can do that. Sometimes people even do it without realising it (for example, when you watch a movie stream, there are people who legitimately argue that you're creating a copy of it in your computer's memory banks. Depending on what type of streaming technology is used, perhaps even a full copy and not just a streaming snippet 20s at a time.

This is why many people argue that the classical copyright system is becoming so difficult to maintain that it may very well become obsolete. A new model would give the artist all kinds of artistic recognition rights, but essentially once he puts it out there, it's out of his control. I am a bit foggy about how they planned to properly compensate the artist for his work, but they had ideas about that, too.

The main problem, when discussing this, isn't the big super stars, btw. Beyonce will always be filthy rich, because she's Beyonce. Copyright and monetisation issues almost always become important once you talk about minor artists who barely scrape by and need every bit of money from their work that they can get. Those are the ones that are hurt most from copyright infringements. If you rip a cd from Beyonce and spread it around, it'll barely even register on her album sales. Heck, some people might buy the album after listening in to it. Spread 1000 copies from a dude around that expects to sell 2000 copies in total? You've just effectively halved his income... not so cool.

[Deleted]

while it should stay illegal, I think the fact that copyright infringement can get you more time in Jail than sexual assault to be fucking laughably stupid.

Move to a country without ridiculous law system.

[Lynarii]

I think that piracy should be very illegal and the penalties for doing it should be stronger...

HOWEVER

Before such a thing should be done, a long hard look needs to be taken at a lot of the reasons that it is so popular. There needs to be a lot stronger consumer protections from companies that put out a shoddy product, stricter penalties (that actually happen) for companies that use deceptive marketing, and a host of other things put in place so that people feel confident that when they put money down on a product, they actually get something worth paying for. As long as industries have practically free reign to dump all over their consumers, too many otherwise law-abiding people have turned to piracy as the only possible way to protect themselves and make sure that what they get is what they were told they were buying.

Once you can eliminate most or all of the fairly legitimate reasons for pirating and get it down to only the shitheads who want free stuff because they can, /then/ throw the book at them. But for most people I know, piracy is nothing more than a symptom of a problem, the real issue is the lack of trust between the producers and consumers of the content. And that can't be repaired by only targeting consumers.

[Deleted]

Currently i think the fight against Illegal download is too strong.

Despite the internet having grown the ways get 'illegal' download movies/series and especially Games industry has grown.I think even music has but it's income has changed to concerts. So with this you can't say illegal download has hurt these industries. It's more that especially music and tv who cling tot he past see potential markets. And it's not just illegal download as a market but they also tried to expand by changing laws in when you need to pay the music company for 'public music'.

Having said that I also acknowledge that the easier you make illegal download and allowing it the more normal it becomes which increases it's frequency and their are people who never buy anything oficial. So I like how it is / was in netherlands that it was sort of allowed but their was a constant battle to limit it. Right now however I think the fight against illegal download is a bit too strong.

What i also hate are restriction from entertainment industry on television providers. Why can't i just watch tv on my computer or record someting on my box and watch it on my pc........really its already pirated.

Illegal download might not be a completly ethical thing to do although if you also buy a lot official the industries still profit. But than again the industries arn't always ethical either and in a certain way it also prevents those industries from becoming more unethical.

[nextormento]

You are stealing (illegally appropriating) yourself the right to reproduce the material in question. Piracy and copyright has never been about merely the act of copying a file on your HDD. It's about the right to copy. Or copyright.

Nowadays you can duplicate entire libraries with literally the press of a button. Anyone can do that. Sometimes people even do it without realising it (for example, when you watch a movie stream, there are people who legitimately argue that you're creating a copy of it in your computer's memory banks. Depending on what type of streaming technology is used, perhaps even a full copy and not just a streaming snippet 20s at a time.

Spread 1000 copies from a dude around that expects to sell 2000 copies in total? You've just effectively halved his income.

There's a bit of a semantic issue with copyright though: it generally applies to use and distribution, not the act of copying, so folks often dismiss the wording. That we legislate IP through means very different than private property is just a testament to that difficulty: you can't steal a right. I think this has been sufficiently articulated; trying to equate piracy to theft is not much of an argument: we know it's different and we regulate it differently.

But yeah. The way the internet is engineered is copying bits from server to server. The very act of legitimate distribution is predicated on a very large series of copies over which the creator has absolutely no control.
But this argument is not very new: the very act of typesetting (placing the metallic sorts on the board) on a printing press is copying. And so is the entire process of audio mastering over any medium (from the master record to a galvanized copy matrix to the end vinyl record).

We're pretending that the issue is more of an issue because of scale. But piracy has always been there. We got pirated books and films during Francoism; we kept pirating audio cassette later on (who hasn't produced a mixtape for someone else!); and we keep pirating through the internet. However, that piracy increases in bulk also means sales (and profit) increases in bulk too due to the wider distribution network.

I very much doubt piracy is more of a problem relative to bulk production, as we've seen a rise in both the big bucks industry as well as an incredibly high amount of indie studios of every kind popping left and right. Heck, any youtuber is a creator, and many can live on that production alone.
Do some small firms struggle? sure they do. But that's what you get when you over-saturate a market. This happened before, at the turn of the century, when many processes were saturated after the industrial revolution, and during the Renaissance (which was the product of markets and trade rapidly expanding).

Small productions, from bards, to scrubby painters in some French attic were essentially out of jobs at some point or another because distribution and production got too efficient for their likes. The solution to these effects was a simple market device: mecenate. From Michelangelo to Antoni Gaudí, folks without wealth were privately sponsored, independently of what legislative protection they could expect. We're seeing that right now, with the rise of Patreon and the like.

Piracy sucks for the small creator. But it happens. It needs to be expected from the very premise of creation: to create new stuff you start by copying. Any sucessful creator needs to embrace that notion: if their stuff is good, it will be copied without their control.
But there's also the other end of the issue: copyright can also work against the interest of the state. The state grants the exclusive privilege of use/distribution on the premise that it will eventually revert back on the state and engross the public domain. That this process is delayed for decades is abhorrent. As it is, I think society should be more concerned about the atrocities that copyright can bring than about those small producers (who should be working out how to get some private sponsoring anyway).

At the end of the day, most people agree some protection should exist. But, so far, we haven't figured exactly the right formula. Illicit copy is a market response to what consumers feel is not fair: more protections encourage more illicit copying.

[Deleted]

Seeing as it's not illegal here (sharing is), it can stay as it is.

[Lartok]

Yes I think it should stay illegal, and not only that, they need to increase the punishment to deter people from doing so.

If you cannot afford something, you shouldn't get it.

But if I can afford a way to get it, should I get it?

[Blueobelisk]

I think downloading is probably fine. I think seeding should be fine-able. I think people who crack stuff or initially do the uploading should pay really heavy fines and possibly go to jail if they can't pay a company back what it potentially lost.

[Lumineus]

How is 1 superior product worse then 2 medicore ones?

You're assuming the merged entity would be more efficient. That's highly erroneous, as there is simply no reason for them to push forward in innovation or provide improved value. What would actually happen, is that once AMD stopped nipping at their heels and undercutting them, nVidia would milk their architectures two to three times as long with their infamously BS gimped versions of each chipset, and charge double for a reference card, of which they would be the only ones (no msi, Gigabyte, eVGA, etc). Hell, it's what they're already doing with the "Founders' edition" for the 1070 and 1080.

[Maglen]

The music industry has figured this out. Spotify/Pandora/random music service largely stops people from pirating. (Can't remember the last time I pirated a CD)

The gaming industry has figured this out. Origin/Steam/ largely stops people from pirating. (Can't remember the last time I pirated a game)

The movie and cable industry has yet to figure this out. Give people easy access to content and they will flock to it. I'd much rather pay $10 or a bit less to watch a brand new movie in my own quiet home than go to a movie theater. I'm currently deployed to Afghanistan and can't get HBO and streaming HBO Go would be a buffering nightmare. Guess how I watch Game of Thrones?

[TheramoreIsTheBomb]

while it should stay illegal, I think the fact that copyright infringement can get you more time in Jail than sexual assault to be fucking laughably stupid.

Its crazy how many things that are less worse than sexual assault can get more jail time for it.