I miss the days of VHS and DVD shelfs in homes, for example. If you bought the tapes and had them in your home, no corporate entity could alter those tapes without your consent, monitor how many times you watch them, sell your data to whomever they please without your knowledge, roll out new mandatory conditions to a ‘user agreement,’ or remove them from your library if/when they like.
I noticed some dumb change in how Dictionary definitions are shown in the Spotlight (ie, overall search my computer function) in MacOS this week. I’ve turned off all auto-updates, and I didn’t make that change or consent to it. But despite paying the full price all by myself for this machine, I clearly don’t have 100% control over it. It seems very clearly to me that consumers having control and privacy over their Internet-connected devices is a bygone era.
After Blizzard, the video game company, replaced copies of Warcraft 3 that I and others had paid for in full and installed on our computers that we could play without connecting to the Internet with a lower-quality copy that prohibited offline play - I swore I’d never pay for a video game again*, and 3 years later I haven’t backslid on that. I felt so angry, cheated, and robbed by that. (*Edit: my criticism and frustration is really more with larger developers/companies/creators - I appreciate and am happy to support smaller, more independent and libre ones.)
Many people probably won’t be bothered by these things, but I am. I don’t want to pay full price for something that I don’t truly own. I miss the familiarity. I miss the reliability. I miss feeling like it’s mine. Dependable. Trustworthy.
Picking my old guitar up again has never looked so appealing. I think I want to go back to investing more time, money, and energy into things that aren’t connected to the internet
What would a child say if they were asked whether they would steal a loaf of bread to feed their starving family if they had no other way of saving them? What would you say? Does context matter in moral judgements?
deleted by creator
I actually think the ethics of media piracy are even less debatable than those of stealing food. If you’re stealing food, you are depriving someone of it. If you copy a song or a movie or a game, literally no one loses anything.
To be clear, I absolutely support people stealing food to survive, especially from stores and double especially from large corporations.
deleted by creator
… no, you literally are not. For that to be the case, you would have to already be planning to purchase the good, and then decide to pirate it instead. Even if that is the case (which in the vast majority of cases it is not), it still requires absurd mental gymnastics to reframe not paying someone money as stealing money from that person. You haven’t signed a contract. The entire concept of a “lost sale” is a lie. If someone pirating a movie is a lost sale, so is someone deciding not to see that movie because the ticket is too expensive, or the reviews are too bad. This is why I said it’s internalized corporate propaganda, because it places the onus for fairly compensating artists on the audience instead of the industry.
Additionally, the economics of almost every media distribution solution in existence means that purchasing a piece of media puts only a miniscule fraction of that price into the hands of the artist. Which is why I mentioned direct donation: giving a music artist you like $10 directly is a better way to support them than paying for Spotify Premium or even buying their discography on CD.
deleted by creator
Oh, you believe in intellectual property. I don’t, and I find the concept an affront to human creativity.
Brad Pitt doesn’t need donations. Anyone who does generally has avenues – very often Patreons, yes.
deleted by creator
Yeah, that’s totally what “an affront to” means. And if you’re seriously arguing that someone with a 9-figure net worth needs compensation to keep producing art, I don’t know what to say to you. I’m not moving any goalposts, I’ve said multiple times that you should support independent creators if you can afford to. Brad Pitt is not an “independent creator”, he’s a fixture in the movie industry who gets paid millions of dollars upfront. Your priorities are gross.
the mental gymnastics you go through to parrot corporate propaganda is honestly just astonishing