this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2024
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I fully agree with the general message, but this particular anecdote doesn't really make sense to me and can easily be waved off by anyone who disagrees with it.
If buying isn't owning, that means it's renting or borrowing.
If you pirate it, they get no money and therefore cannot rent it out to you. You cannot just steal a movie from the movie rental store or a car from a car rental place. That's stealing.
Sure, it's infinitely reproducible but that's not what this meme says. That's an unrelated argument for piracy. It draws a direct connection between the 2 relationships of buying + owning and pirating + stealing. However, one has nothing to do with the other.
When someone owns something, they are allowed to rent it out and take it back at any time. It's always been that way and that's valid.
The real argument should be "if there was no intention to buy in the first place, then piracy isn't stealing" or something like that.
Let me rephrase. I agree that piracy isn't stealing, but the fact that buying isn't owning does NOT prove that at all, nor does it have anything to do with it. It's a reason people pirate, sure, but it in no way proves that piracy isn't stealing. The phrase is an if;then statement. If one thing is true, it MEANS the other is true, which just isn't the case. Both can be true sure, but proving the first half does not prove the second half. Making one true does not instantly make the other true.
This will not make anyone at ubisoft mad. In fact, they will be glad that such a poorly crafted argument is being used against them, since it's 0 effort to disprove and dismiss it. We should raise other arguments that are logically sound if we want to convince anyone - friends, family, lawmakers - of anything.
Am I completely missing the point or is this analogy completely nonsensical?
On a side note, I condone piracy and nobody should ever give money to large media corporations. But if we use stupid arguments like this it makes us easier to dismiss.
Edit: I'm looking for discussion here. If you're going to downvote me, at least tell me why you think my argument is wrong. I'm here to learn.
It's about them missrepresenting the transaction. If you go to the store and rent a movie then it's an agreement that it's temporary. If you buy it then they can't take it back, what they are doing is fraud and complaining that we don't want to deal with them.
That phrase means "if you will make an enemy out of me and won't let me buy the kind of ownership I want, I'll take it and ignore paying you".
But notice that the full explanation is longer? That phrase captures perfectly well the antagonizing perspective, and nobody goes around making sure they pay fairly the people that treat them as enemies. It also fails to capture any other bit of the logic, but it's ok, the logic is simple and automatic once the antagonism is explicitated.
"You disrespect me when you use the word BUY when you mean RENT, I'll show you the same disrespect by denying you any monetary gain that you normally get from ghosting your customers"
Sometimes I wish I could have the skills to hack these websites - change every "Buy" to "Rent", add a " Why am I seeing this?" and then explain that the transaction is for "Digital key revocable at any time by (insert scummy corporate here)".
Then I'll happily laugh and watch their profits drop , while they try to publish a statement defending their position.
I can see that, that's a good point. However, it's so easy to misconstrue that phrase into an objective statement of "the relationship between buying and owning directly creates the relationship between piracy and stealing" and the average person, lawmaker, etc can easily get confused when the "ones who own all the content" try to disprove that statement even though it's not the statement we're trying to make.
What is literally said in the meme is incorrect, even if it means something completely different. We need to say what we mean, not make a catchy analogy that's technically incorrect and easily used against us.
Yeah, I can agree with that. And somebody will eventually find some way to use that mismatch against people.
But the correct language doesn't have an impact, and we don't decide what gets popular anyway. I don't like that phrase either (I think it's too conservative), but it's here to stay.
From all of these replies, I'm getting the feeling that people generally don't understand that the phrase is objectively incorrect, whether or not they agree with its sentiment (which they all do, at least around here). So I am questioning the overall effectiveness of sharing it. But like you said, I think it's here to stay specifically because everyone seems to agree with the sentiment behind it so much, without considering it objectively.
We're getting to a bigger picture here which I can't even speculate on, but at least I learned something about this particular narrative. I just hope this meme doesn't do too much harm when people get into debates with others that disagree.
You are getting bogged down in the details. The phrase is a slogan for the sentiment behind it. Sometimes it is more effective to capture the vibe behind something with an eight word phrase instead of writing an essay properly explaining it. We're discussing a meme not a legal document.
Your argument sounds like someone saying that you should never use "All cops are bastards" because it is an absolute statement and it is statistically likely that there could be at least one cop somewhere in the world that isn't a bastard and hasn't yet been drummed out or given up and quit. Sure, a more accurate phrase is: "The overwhelming majority of police officers are bastards and even the very few among them that are actively making an effort to be beneficial to society are still propping up and participating in an oppressive and highly problematic system" but you can't exactly print that on a coffee mug, can you?
That's because it's the same argument. Both sayings are stupid, not because of the message behind them but because of their uselessness in actual conversation with anyone who might disagree. It's just circlejerking at that point, only shareable and discussable with people who already agree or know what it really is supposed to mean.
Do you know what someone who disagrees hears when I say ACAB? They hear me calling millions of people I've never met a mean name. It doesn't matter what I want it to mean. Even if I explain to them what it is supposed to mean (the conversation probably wouldn't even get that far), the fact stands that I called millions of people I've never met a mean name. And that's all anyone needs to dismiss my argument.
The whole point of these phrases is to spread the message to people who either don't care or disagree. And they are NOT effective at that very specific thing. These phrases are fine at letting people who already agree pat each other on the back though. These phrases push away the target audience.
I don't disagree with anything you said but I wanted to point out that you are on lemmy.world, which is about 80% circle jerk, thats why its so common to see it here. The local posts in my instance are a lot less reactionary, once I turn on all is when I start seeing mob mentality type stuff.
Also, by the way, technically you can quote any predicate as a consequence of a false one.
I don't know if the people that made this phrase knew that, but it's technically correct :)
basically if you get to be a scumbag so do I
2 wrongs don't make a right, this phrase just points out how piracy is a service issue
I agree that it's a good reason to pirate, but the meme/phrase is ostensibly trying to use the definition of owning to change the definition of stealing.
It doesn't prove anything, it just gives a good reason why people are pirating, when it looks like it's trying to prove some logical relationship of the concepts.
if my property can be taken without fair compensation so can theirs.
pretty cut and dry logical relationship.
my opinion: it's not stealing in the Classic sense because if you copy something you don't take it away from its owner. it might be against the law because intellectual property is a concept.
What's the aversion to calling it stealing. It feels like stealing any other thing. You would steal games for the same reasons you might steal a physical good.
Do we just want a separate word that means digital theft?
Because it's not—by definition—stealing?
Source
Digital piracy is:
Why does everyone keep adding that qualifier to stealing like it makes any sense? So if I steal something from someones vacation home and return it before they visit, its not stealing either right? Thats residential piracy is it?
How about I love a painting so much but I'm an asshole and I think artists don't deserve to be paid for art, so I sneak in while he's sleeping, with a replica in tow, and swap out his real painting for the identical fake. Thats not stealing either?
I don't know what changed over the years really, it was stealing in the 90s and stealing in the 00s, and then some people figured if they just said it wasnt stealing enough it would stick?
You can argue the prices aren't appropriate but its hard to argue you should get all your games for free just because, oh well nothings lost. I even pirate games but I'm not afraid to call it stealing.
It's still theft. You intended to and successfully managed to deprive someone of their property, albeit temporarily. You would also still end up in front of a court for trespassing and breaking and entering.
Still theft, but with copyright infringement on top. You have deprived the artist of his property—his physical copy of the painting.
People unquestionably accepting falsehoods is what changed. Have you noticed that when pirates do get caught and taken to civil or criminal court, it's for copyright infringement, computer fraud and abuse, wire fraud, or something else tangential to theft but not actually theft? It's because digital piracy is legally not "theft".
I am not making that argument.
I don't, and I still wouldn't call your digital piracy stealing. In English-speaking countries, at least, the law considers it to be copyright infringement.
In the same vain, I wouldn't call randomly sucker-punching someone "assault": it's battery.
In america the law changes from state to state. I don't understand the point of appealing to law when its different depending where you are.
I'm talking morally, which I don't tie to laws, and it seems like pirates don't either. It is morally equivalent to stealing, and it hurts artists. Theres a bunch of hoops people jump through to try to negate that fact, but its just another halo effect to make people think something wrong is something right.
I find interesting that I remember buying a game in Brazil in 1995 (the 11th hour, sequel to The 7th Guest) and in the receipt it was written “license to use”. So, even back then we were already told that it was a permission, not ownership.
Exactly. This has always been a problem to some extent, but back then no company ever revoked that license or even cared what people did with it unless they sold pirated copies. So it wasn't a problem for us either.
I know what you mean and I agree. It's always seemed to not really make logical sense when I hear it. It isn't quite right. Like you, I also agree with the actually message behind it though.