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.
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.
Coding isn’t always compensated. Open source projects thrive because of the work of developers that don’t get paid in most cases. That doesn’t stop them (although it’s probably because they do other work and can spare time and money).
My point is that both, art and coding, don’t require compensation. Many people do both for the sake of it.
That doesn’t mean they don’t deserve compensation (in the form of donations). They do, most than any other.
I’m fine with compensation, I’m not fine with the whole work once and siphon off the labor of others into eternity.
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?
🤣
It is a statistical fact that people who pirate things tend to buy more things than people who never pirate anything. Furthermore, people who exclusively pirate are a minority. It is also a fact that the majority of pirates would rather pay for things if the service provided is a superior experience to that of piracy.
Gabe Newell said “Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem.”
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.
Soooo people shouldn’t get paid for taking time to create books, movies, music, textbooks, newspapers?
There should be means that would allow fans and appreciators donate money to creators. And it looks like we already have a lot of those.
Also, culture and art should be promoted by governments. Therefore taxes could go that way too.
Anyway, it’s not like people say it’s fine for everyone to not pay. But at least we know it’s fine for many to pay much less than the rest, see regional pricing and discounts. Creators are totally fine with those. Nothing prevents it from being extended further to people who have a hard time trying to become potential customers.
I think a good compromise is to allow for sale for a period of years, and then when it’s no longer making as much profits, for a creator to give permission for it to be ok to be pirated, which basically means that they’ve sorta kinda maybe ceded legal consequences to pirating their work.
What of there were a model for video games where the games themselves were free to download and play, but things like cosmetics, weapons, stat boosts, and character unlocks were sold piecemeal to those willing to pay?
That model certainly wouldn’t become a cancer on the entire industry and ruin online gaming, making us beg for the days when you could just buy a fucking game and play it.
In a reality where there are no paid games (I assume Witcher-tier single player games would be free), those wouldn’t necessarily become a cancer. It all depends on what games you must compete with. Also there are many ways how you can implement cosmetics and other DLC. FOMO enforcement is not something that should automatically come with any game. Deep Rock Galactic handles paid dlc, free seasons and cosmetics brilliantly in my opinion, and I don’t see why other games can’t have success if they did it the same way. Maybe it’s a combination of original financial decisions, game quality, players reactions and overall current situation/background.
Also I can’t get rid of the thought that there is an underestimated connection between spending money on a game and desire to spend time on playing it. It seems that if developers of good games would be suitably rewarded according to players satisfaction, there will be no need to pursue financial success by pushing cancer on players.
Why the fuck do they make money 15 years after doing the work though? Build a house, you get paid for the house. Write a song? Infinite money.
15 years? What about 80 years? There are movies from the 40s that are still under copyright.
Copyright is generally a good idea. There has to be some level of restriction, otherwise infinite copies of your art immediately show up and you cant make a living.
On the flipside, it harms the industry at large if the copyright is too long. There is no reason why a corporate entity should be making royalties on something long after it’s creator has died.
So, where is the middle point? What is a good length of time to let an artist exclusively sell their art without fear of someone undercutting them as soon as they make something? Personally, i think the US figured out the sweet spot before all the changes. 14 years, plus a single 14 year extension you have to register. 28 years is enough time that you can make a career, but also not long enough to harm the creative process or prevent art from reaching the masses while its relevant.
Consider the following:
One day we manage to reach the pinnacle of invention - we create the replicator from Star Trek. We can suddenly bring immense amounts of anything we want for everyone in the world, for very little energy (caveat: I don’t know enough about Star Trek lore to know this to be true).
Now, this machine would certainly make a whole lot of business models redundant - farming, factory work, you name it - they would all no longer be able to make a living doing what they did before this invention existed.
Now for the moral question - should the fact that this invention will harm certain groups’ way of life be considered enough of a motivation to prohibit the use of this invention? Despite the immense wealth we could bring upon the world?
Take a pause to form an opinion on the subject.
Now that you’ve formed an opinion on the replicator - consider that we already have replicators for all types of digital media. It can be infinitely replicated for trivial amounts of energy. Access to the library of all cataloged information in the world is merely a matter of bandwidth.
Now, should the fact that groups relying on copyright protection for their way of life be considered reason enough to prohibit the use of the information replicator?
To me, the answer is clear. The problem of artists, authors, actors, programmers and so on not being able to make money as easily without copyright protection does not warrant depriving the people of the world from access to the information replicator. What we should focus on is to find another model under which someone creating information can sustain themselves.
That’s exactly the problem.
Under the current system, people that produce creative works as their job are forced to monetize them. Until we live in a post-scarcity world where everyone’s needs are met, like Star Trek, we have to deal with capitalist problems. To say otherwise is to ensure a system where artists and authors are unable to survive. Currently, the copyright system is good enough™ that creating art can be profitable enough that they are not destitute.
Simply because the technology exists to endlessly replicate and distribute art, regardless of the wishes of the artist (for which it is already frequently used, if you look at piracy channels) does not mean that it should be used with reckless abandon.
If replicators existed in our universe, they would probably have some sort of DRM built-in and make you pay a fee to the people who made the patterns it replicates whenever you use it. This would naturally progress to bundles and subscriptions, just like how we went from digitally “buying” movies to paying for streaming services that give us access to a large bundle of media. There would also be no way around this because whoever invented the technology would be the only one selling it and the DRM would likely be hardware-level.
the good thing about copyright is that it’s the only thing that might protect an individual against a giant company to steal someone’s work and drown it with an insanely more marketed version to make money off of someone else’s work without compensating them. i mean they already do that as best they can but it would be worse without copyright protections.
on the other hand i would severely limit copyrights in general, and even more for publishers and companies. I’d much rather individuals retain rights to IP than companies.
i realize there are some problems that might arise from such a system but it would be much less significant than the BS we have today.
but wait, oh no, that means Sony shouldn’t have exclusive rights to churn out another vaguely spider-man-related shit stain! how will our culture survive this?
it’ll be fine.
It’s not always that simple. If I write a song, then I don’t want my song to be used in a big budget Hollywood production without me getting a dime.
Hey, what’s up with the big bold blue letters?
You can change the display of your username on the Web version of Lemmy and it accepts emojis.
D:
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
Artists and creators need and want to be paid. It’s fulfilling for some of them to have a monetary success associated with their work, and for others they need those funds to survive. We should pay artists and creators, I don’t care if people pirate. Pay the goddamn creators you like so they keep making more cool stuff!
I saw this video on here sometime ago and thought it brought up a great alternative that still lets people experience these things for free and lets artists still get paid:
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/mnnYCJNhw7w
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Please correct me if I am wrong, but wouldn’t lack of IP just let anyone abuse a creators original work? Like if George Lucas didn’t have any IP over Star Wars, Disney wouldn’t need to partner with him etc. He’s famous because of prior work, so would be alright. That wouldn’t fly for smaller creators though
I think they address that in the video.
I find this opinion hard to reconcile with Lemmy users’ general stance that Reddit/Google are in the wrong for using comments to train AI without asking permission.
What job do you do? I take it you do it for free yourself since that’s what you are advocating for
To be fair, it would be based if everyone did their job for free.
Money sucks. Everything should be free.
Information and art is meant to be shared and enjoyed.
And sometimes art and information is released for free and you are more than welcome to enjoy that for free, but when the artist asks for a payment for services rendered, and you refuse payment but still use their services, you are breaking a social contract (and a legal one, as well). To not pay for services rendered is illegal. If you want to use something, whether you are renting a car for the weekend, or you are using someones art for entertainment, if they require a payment for the service you use, you are obligated to pay for that service if you use it. If you don’t want to pay for it, then don’t use the service. You aren’t owed a video game, movie, book, textbook, or newspaper anymore than you are owed a rental car. If you use a service, you pay for the service, even if the service is entertainment.
You’re both right.
So I’ll talk about a totally different point:
The day the MPAA and the RIAA sued fans for tens of thousands of dollars for pirating content that was still generating millions, is the day I said I would never, ever, pay for their content again, and pirate it guilty-free.
Agreed. Once you start blocking culture to only those who can afford it you start losing culture once it becomes unprofitable.
The audacity from woke people.
this opinion has nothing to do with woke people smh. this is just the new sin word just like how they did with communism. everything conservstives didn’t like was conmunism, now everything they don’t like is being woke
Ohhhhhhhhhh when woke being pointed at as woke they don’t like.
But they keep telling non woke as communist, far right and anarchist.
Smh.
it’s about racial equality and lbtq rights, and alertness to discrimantion.
but some people don’t like that so they made it a hate word against everything leftist.
what the fuck are you smoking if that term somehow translates to “piracy is cool”? it sure ain’t weed. I guess you’re just smoking a big ass blunt of right wing propaganda.
Anything left don’t like = propaganda. Now pat yourself in the back.
and anything right don’t like is woke or communism. BOOM! what an amazing comeback. so twisting terms to anything “bad” ain’t propaganda? sure buddy. keep telling yourself that.
but since your response didn’t address any of my point and you didn’t elaborate how racial equality etc. means woke people support piracy I know this conversation is pointless.
have a good day
I see no merit spending energy to engage with… woke supporter.
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.
deleted by creator
The parent poster was simply replying to the ridiculous car analogy. He even addressed part of your argument.
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.
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.
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
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
YOU WOULDN’T DOWNLOAD A CAR
I WOULD IF I COULD
if you want to build a copy of my car be my guest
Uh no? Cars have functions, and very real material costs that digital art does not.
So material costs are important, but paying artists a living wage for their art isn’t?
If that involves stifling other’s creativity and harming society, then I’d argue no.
Realistically, it is a balancing act.
Copyright, patent and even trademark laws should promote sustainable creativity and societal progress. They try to achieve this by granting some extra (non-intrinsic) rights to creators.
That these are regularly abused to stifle competition and creativity in the name of profit is a cancer deserving treatment.
And faced with an imperfect world: If any law or its implementation feels unjust, then most people will feel morally OK with breaking it.
Nobody said you shouldn’t pay artists.
You must be a troll. Good joke.
Pretty cool move. If I come across one of his games that interests me, I’ll gladly buy it.
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
In my teenage years and early 20s I pirated everything because I was broke. I could squirrel away enough money to build a low grade gaming computer and the benefit to me was “I don’t have to pay for games because I can pirate them”. That or I survived on Demo CDs that came with magazines I got at the book store (and later on I think it was demoplanet.com?). If it wasn’t for these resources, I probably never would have gotten into PC gaming.
Now that I have expendable income, I buy games that I want to play.
I would never have been a customer if I wasn’t originally a pirate. It’s the circle of life.
Also I just went and bought this game because I have money to support shit like this and I’m all about supporting developers who understand.
Based jakito
Based.
Makes me wanna buy the game even though I know literally nothing about it.
Right? First thing, look for a torrent. Second, put aside some money when I have it.
Note to PC gamers: If you have anything with RTX on it, you are not broke.
These devs fuck
The strategy makes a lot of business sense too. It’s why piracy controls in Microsoft Windows were so weak for so long.
Steve Ballmer said something along the lines of if the Chinese are going to pirate software, I want it to be Microsoft software.
I’m not sure if this game has an online mode but generally speaking the network effect of online means more people playing equals a better online experience. If half those people didn’t pay, the ones who did pay still get a better online experience right?
Gangster dev
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.
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.
Which he did. His statement is the license.
Plus free software doesn’t strictly mean that the author doesn’t get paid for their work.
Piracy isn’t a libre licence.
Libre licence means sharing the source code and the game assets.
Here piracy means free to play.
And you’re right free software doesn’t mean the author doesn’t get paid. But that’s not the point here.
Lastly, in some legislations (author’s right), a statement like this one don’t work because the author himself cannot violate his own rights. Which mean that people can be sue for pirating a work even if the author stated that people can pirate it. To me, it’s endangering the audience.
On the bright side, it’s still nice to have an author acknowledging piracy doesn’t steal sells and that culture is meant to be shared.
deleted by creator
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.
Edit: I also read the actual tweet. I think the author was responding to an “aha, gotcha!” moment. Someone posted a screenshot of them pirating his game with the caption “I love pirating indie games.” It almost feels like a troll post. And the dev didn’t bite the bait. He was like “eh, you do you. Devs gotta eat, sure, but you know what, culture should be accessible too.”
Your argument is weak.
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Ultrakill made the game to make money. Releasing a game “for free” for all makes no business sense.
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Plenty of publishers do release games for free. Though they hope sell players’ data, or ads or add-ons.
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This dev is just one dev. Everyone else is free to do whatever they want.
So, there.
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.
This is true. I don’t see a problem with that. Give me $100 million dollars. It will be pretty easy for me to do neat stuff that doesn’t necessarily bring me profits.
Edit: Downvoted by corporate suits. On Lemmy of all places.
Additionally: word of mouth can turn into sales down the line, too, if the pirate liked the game and talks about it.
At worst, the developer isn’t negatively impacted (by people pirating a game they couldn’t afford / had no intention of buying), at best it leads to more sales.
I don’t see the problem.
And I know that someone reading this will be foaming at their mouth, excited to say “But what if everyone did this? Then developers/studios/… wouldn’t make any money and stop producing games/movies/…!”, so I have to preemptively add the following:
- obviously this is not the case. Pirates have existed for decades.
- pirates pirate because the cost is either too high for them to afford, or higher than what they value the game/… at. If you consider yourself a “rational capitalist” (which, let’s be real, is what most of the anti-piracy-crowd sees themselves at) then consider this as the market working as intended: demand simply isn’t high enough at the price they’re selling at
- and once more, just to make sure this comes across, pirating a digital product incurrs zero (0) loss on the side of the developer/studio. No, you can not count “virtual” losses from what they could have sold if the pirates ever had the intention of buying, or pirating didn’t exist (because, y’know, it does).
Edit: btw I say this as someone who has never pirated a game except for Minecraft when I was, like, 10. I love playing (esp. Indie) games and am happy to pay for them. I just want people to leave folks alone who can’t.
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The people cracking games were never in a position to buy the games in the first place.
I wouldn’t necessarily say never. Truthfully, I’ve pirated a few games and once I found out I loved them I’ve bought copies. I had the capacity to buy, but didn’t want to sink the money in for a potentially low return. I definitely would never have had the money to buy all of the games I pirated over the years though.
I also don’t consider sharing of ROMs of outdated games that are no longer available for sale in order to use in an emulator as piracy, and I’d say the vast majority of my fee-free game downloads were focussed there. How can I be depriving the creators of anything if I literally have no way to pay them to access the content?
The point is that a pirated copy is not a lost sale, because it was not guaranteed that the pirate would have bought a copy if they could afford it or whatever.
Anti-piracy people hate reading this, but piracy leads to more sales in many cases. People don’t want to spend so much on something they will only maybe like. Many people who pirate a game often end up spending more money than people who bought it outright.
I am one of them. I pirated NieR Automata, because I had no idea if I was going to like it or not. I bought 2 copies on PS4, 3 copies on Xbox One, and 2 copies on Steam to give to friends. For myself I also bought the White Snow Edition of NieR 1.22, a still sealed copy of NieR Gestalt imported from Japan, and a digital copy of NieR 2010 on the Xbox Store. I even felt so inclined that I broke the one rule I have and spent money on the mobile gacha game, not because I wanted any certain character or whatever, but because I literally wanted to tell the company that I want to buy more NieR products and want to see more of what Yoko Taro can cook up.
One instance of me pirating a game generated that much revenue for the company where I otherwise would have had no motivation to give that to Square Enix, and my friends would very likely not have played the game either.
Honestly I only personally consider anything as piracy if the product is still available for sale from the actual publisher/developer. If its no longer available, then whether I pirate it or not doesn’t matter to the company because where I other wise would give them money, they apparently don’t want it.
It is a piracy. Stop making excuse
