this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2024
1405 points (100.0% liked)
People Twitter
7475 readers
1868 users here now
People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
RULES:
- Mark NSFW content.
- No doxxing people.
- Must be a pic of the tweet or similar. No direct links to the tweet.
- No bullying or international politcs
- Be excellent to each other.
- Provide an archived link to the tweet (or similar) being shown if it's a major figure or a politician.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
--Thomas Jefferson
This is a dishonest response. Movies and media are not ideas. They are representations of ideas that take time and effort to create and that are created so that the artist that made them can make a living and pay their bills. Stealing those representations without compensating the artist for their time and effort means they can’t pay their bills which means they have to stop creating in order to get a job where the fruits of their efforts aren’t stolen.
That statement makes no sense in this context, regardless of whether I reflect on its poor grammar or not.
Sure it does, you just don't like the substance of it.
No. The substance of it is irrelevant to my argument. You’re still arguing ideas which content that is created is not. It may be intangible but it is not simply an idea. It is a manifestation of an idea and is, therefore, wholly different.
Not to put too fine a point on it - ideas are like assholes; everyone has them and most of them stink but the idea of an asshole doesn’t actually make you wretch the way the stench of an actual asshole might.
Not quite; what makes ideas incompatible with exclusive possession is the same thing that makes digital content incompatible with exclusive possession - their intangibility. A person can labor for years on an idea, and retain exclusive ownership over that idea having not realized it to others; "but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it."
The same applies to digitally represented media.
You've made a statement about the labor involved in producing an idea or digital media, and I'm making a statement about the nature of intangible goods. Embodied labor isn't the same as some objective moral or ethical imperative, nor is embodied labor the same as value.
If you want to watch something enough to pirate it, it has value.
Everything else you said is a dishonest argument that you would not accept for your own time, work, and effort. The mere fact that an idea is materialized into something more than an idea invalidates the crux of your argument. An idea is just that. An idea materialized into reality, even an intangible reality, is still more than the idea itself.
I haven't claimed it doesn't have value. I've only challenged your implication that 'value' and 'market extractive value' are -or ought to be- in balance. If you can acknowledge that not everything that has 'value' has a commensurate 'market value', then you should be able to see that a piece of digital media can have 'value' but doesn't necessarily have a commensurate 'market value'.
Demand is only representative of market value where supply can be said to be reasonably restricted, and if supply needs to be artificially restricted in order to justify it's market value then the circumventing of that restriction can't really be said to be 'stealing' in the moral or ethical sense of the word.
It can if you're ingesting the product. If you're ingesting the end product then value and market extractive value are the same. Either you think it's worth the price that the creator is asking or you don't. If you don't, then that doesn't mean you're entitled to view it for free just because you think they're asking too much. It means you don't get to watch it and they don't get to be paid for it.
Everything else you said is irrelevant. The supply is the creator, not the product that the creator made. If they can't make a living creating those products, then those products go away. Whether you want to claim that's artificial or not is completely moot.
Wut? I thought we abolished slavery? The fuck are you talking about?
Lol, only if by 'moot' you mean 'foundational'. All you've said so far is, 'it's stealing because that's just the way it is'.
You've said this a couple times now, is this like some kind of safe word? 'I don't like your reasoning so I'll just say it's irrelevant'. LMAO.
You're talking about supply and demand for intangible products. That means that you're either being intentionally obtuse about the fact that intangibles aren't affected by supply and therefore can't be bound to it or you're being dishonest about the argument from the start. No one is talking about slavery. No one mentioned it. You're mischaracterizing what I said so that you can dismiss it because it invalidates the argument you've attempted to make.
And now you've confirmed that you're being dishonest because I've said far more than "that's just the way it is". I've provided the logic behind the argument and the evidence for why it is stealing and even prefaced the argument with the clarification that I am not against piracy and that I believe that there are situations in which case it may be justified and even beneficial. You ignoring that is why I know you're being dishonest and why this third point is justified.
I'm not saying that because I don't like your reasoning. I'm saying it because what you've said has no bearing on the point I'm making nor is it in any way an argument against what I'm saying. You're arguing something else entirely which means it's irrelevant to the point I'm making and therefore unnecessary to address or even validate.
Maybe you're just confusing terminology, but traditionally 'supply' is referring to 'supply of a commodity', as in 'supply and demand' economics. I took -'The supply is the creator, not the product that the creator made'- to mean the creator is the commodity you're paying for and not the product, but maybe i've misunderstood your point.
Actually I think I was being generous, you seemed to be talking about economic properties of price and value since you were implying that a digital product's 'price' was determined by your willingness to pay for it (i.e. demand). That's how our market works now, and I was pointing out that the nature of digital media is that the supply is theoretically unlimited so market price would be zero without an artificial restriction in supply (i.e. withholding access in order to justify a price). Maybe you really don't know what you're talking about here, but honestly it's hard to tell anymore. Regardless, I'm pretty sure you're arguing that creators should own and control access to their work so that they can extract their price from it? If that's the case, then I'm saying that ownership and artificial restriction to the access to that work is literally what makes that possible. You've alluded to as much when you say that piracy is stealing; by circumventing that restricted access you're denying the price the creator is demanding? It is directly relevant to the point you're trying to make.
Maybe you should put your argument in precise terms, so it's impossible for me to misunderstand then?
Yes, you have. Creators/artists/producers exchange their time and talent for something - whether that's money or something else that they gain as a result. Their time and talent are the scarce "supply" that would normally be "supplied" in your argument. It's not slavery to exchange your time/effort/labor/creations in exchange for money or another commodity. That's literally how jobs work.
I think you're just overextending my point to give yourself something to argue against. All I am saying is that creators deserve to be paid for their work (if that's what they're asking in exchange for that work) and that, if people are pirating that work, then it means they find some value in it. Nothing more, nothing less.
I have put my argument in precise terms but you're just ignoring it and arguing something else entirely.
And I'm saying they should be paid for their work, not for exclusive access to it.
Who should they be paid by, then, if not the people who want access to that work?
Remove all your preconceptions about distributors and production studios and whatever other justifications you've used to condone piracy. At what point is it ok to not pay for an artists work? Is it ok if they're just a single person and you're taking it from them without paying? Is it ok if they work for a studio and you take it without paying the studio? Or is it ok if Amazon or someone else paid to have it made and is distributing and marketing it? What's the cut-off where it's ok and where people do deserve to get paid vs. where they don't deserve to get paid?
I'm not taking anything from them, they spend their time on the work and then relinquish the product of that work at the time and price of their choosing. By the time that work gets to me, the artist will have extracted a price for the work and whoever received it from them would have paid it. An creator doesn't possess the less by their work being copied.
Copying is not taking. Copying is not taking. Copying is not taking.
Artists starve and loose their houses now, in this system, even absent any piracy. Who is to blame for that injustice? Is art only valuable if it can be profited from? Let's not pretend that the market has ever meant to favor artists. What harm has been done to the Da Vinci by my viewing the Mona Lisa from online, if I sneak into a ballet at intermission that I couldn't afford otherwise? What harm has been done to a baker if I take a loaf of bread from their trash?
We encourage waste and exclusion because our system depends on it, not because it's ethical or justified.
We all should pay for it. We produce gratuitous surplus, we can provide the means of living to everyone without concern for exchanging it for labor. Art has always been a product of surplus time, even before agriculture. That work has always had value, and it has always been done freely. We should be celebrating the marvel of technology that allows infinite access to all our creative work, not crippling it with legal battles and accusations of theft.
...to the people who have paid for that work.
Yes, they do. Otherwise, you'd have to pay for it. Without paying for it, you would't be able to consume it.
The media itself is not what's being stolen. It's the income being stolen by ingesting/consuming the media. If you don't pay for it, you don't consume it unless you steal it.
I have never made that argument nor that point.
You didn't pay for a loaf of bread. This is disingenuous anyways because bakers bake their goods in order to get paid for them.
An entirely different argument than what I'm making. A different system that what we live in doesn't exist currently so that entire argument is meaningless and piracy doesn't somehow magically bring about that other system.
Again with the fantasy. I agree with your fantasy. I would love that. We don't live in a world where people don't need money to survive. Full stop.
This is false. "Pay for it" or "Pirate it" are not the only 2 options available.
What are the other options then?
Not to consume it at all, obviously.
Your measurement for converting potential revenue into loss hinges on those being the only 2 options.
I have pointed that out as a possibility. Not consuming it at all, though, is not theft precisely because the person isn't consuming it.
In which case piracy only accounts for lost revenue if and only if the pirate would have 100%, guaranteed, purchased the content if a pirates copy was not available. So your calculation does not work.
This is exactly why my calculation does work. If a pirated copy was not available, they wouldn't be able to consume the media without paying for it.
But they also wouldn't have to pay for it. Which is the only way your calculation would work.
It isn't fantasy, we have social programs now, UBI exists now, 4 hour and reduced working hours are happening now.
You are the one insisting that compensation must come from exclusive ownership and consumption, and I've made a very realistic case for an alternative. Dismissing it as fantasy does nothing to prove otherwise.
Why? I have no need for synonyms when that world is perfectly clear and accurate for what is happening.
You being pompous and overly verbose makes you look bad.
Oh another good ad-hominem, also I think maybe projection in this case.
Ok... and?
Ok... now we know you are being disingenuous and not arguing in good faith. You (unless you are not reading these) just admitted to being overly verbose, pompous and that it makes you look bad. Also that you are making ad-hominem arguments while trying to claim other arguments/points are wrong because they are ad-hominem.
I must bow in this display of wordsmithing, as you have done all this in just 2 words.
I didn't admit that. Reread what I wrote.
I also did not do that. I was not saying that anyone's point was wrong when I insulted them. I insulted them because they were not actually addressing the argument. The insults were intended in what I wrote to them precisely because they weren't making an argument against what I was saying. They were being dismissive and I was returning that dismissiveness in kind.
In response to:
I did not think I would have to explain what projection is in this context.
Oh and my point about your insulting people while trying to shut down arguments was that you are being a hypocrite and that further hurts your argument/point. You claiming someone is being "dismissive" by not agreeing with you is not really the defence you likely think it is.