Lol. Social contract? It’s not a social contract if it is written in paper by lawyers of only one side. It’s terms of service, which poorly transcribe rules of material world to the world of information.
I could copy your comment, and use it’s text as I would like. Have I stolen your comment? Have I violated social contract between us by doing so?
It is a social contract. We’re not talking about contracts or terms of services. We’re talking about the most basic social contract of any society in existence - you do/give something for/to me in exchange for me doing/giving something for/to you.
Did I make my comment with the expectation that someone would pay for it? No? Then your comment is nonsense.
Yeah, my analogy was bad. Haven’t put enough thought in it. But now that I did thought on the topic, I still can’t agree with you, here’s why:
If we were talking about our good old physical world, you’d be correct. For example we can take such thing as tipping: in the US you absolutely must tip. If I’ll go to the US I still will be expected to leave a tip, even though I’m not a local, and I will absolutely break a social contract if I do otherwise. Kinda obvious.
But here’s a thing: first of all, social contract is a consensus inside of a group. If there’s no consensus, there’s no social contract. There could be some, of course, if we look at a smaller set of people.
But, here’s one more: the people in the Internet are not as divided as in real world, they’re all mixed up almost in every way they could be, so there’s no social contracts about the Internet, if we’re talking about it as a the whole of course, and so there are definitely none on the piracy topic.
Where I came from, piracy is fine. Where you came from it is almost a crime. We have different social contracts irl.
So yeah, when you said that pirating is a social contract violation, what group of people you meant as the context? Because we’re currently on c/piracy, here it is the norm. And if there was a social contract on the discussed topic on lemmy, there would be no such community as the one we’re currently chatting in.
You could say that piracy violates our agreement on that stealing is bad, I might’ve said that you can’t steal the information, since you’re always only copying the original, but that would be not true. One could steal the information.
My point is that piracy is different from stealing. What’s the distinction you may ask? Giving the credit I say.
Here is the example: you’re a compositor. I steal your song if I copy it, maybe add some minor details (even though this step is completely optional), and then release it as if it was mine. This is stealing. Cutting webcomics’ watermarks and posting them that way, is also stealing.
But if you upload your copy of a product you purchased, without covering original author’s name and claiming it yours, it’s sharing, don’t you think? Louvre pirated Mona Lisa by scanning it and sharing the scan online. You could see Mona Lisa for free. Does it lessen the amount of people wanting to visit the Louvre? I doubt that:)
Your argument is flawed. If you’ve ever purchased any kind of media for money then you are aware of the social contract. If you have a job where you do a service for someone in exchange for money, you are aware of and understand the social contract. The only subsection of people that this wouldn’t apply to is people who have only ever purchased physical goods and never paid for a service and I have to imagine that number is near zero.
As far as the “stealing” comment, you’re stealing the income from the creator. You’re not stealing the media if you’re not depriving someone of it. We can agree on that. If you make use of something without paying for it and it wasn’t given to you as a gift, you are stealing the livelihood from the creator who made it with the expectation that they would be paid for its use. Sharing something in this context is just semantics. If it wasn’t given to you with the intent to be shared, then that’s breaking another social contract.
There’s no other way to put it except that people would stop making art the way they do if they couldn’t make money off it. We live in a world where we need to make a living while trying to make the things we’re passionate about. There are very few people in the chain that make so much money that they can afford to do it while people “share” their work without paying.
And would they? Why are you assuming that pirate is a non-buyer? And have you read what I wrote? Are you really can’t see the problem in your logic, or are you intentionally ignorant because my statements are not to your liking, or because you have too much ego to admit that you are wrong? Just wondering.
Yeah, all your assertions are being disproven by the simple fact that a pirate could still buy the product. And a good pirate will buy the product if everything is to his liking.
Moreover, pirating is a more aggressive competing environment. What does it mean? Art evolution. If you are happened to be a pirate, you try products, and then finance them how ever you would like. It’s almost like a selection in agriculture. You like the sweet apples, but want them to be even sweetier? Select the sweetest of them, plant them, grow them, reiterate until you’re happy. Because now what y’all are planting are all the seeds you have, in a futile hope that the next time you will get lucky.
About all that “lost income” racket. To me it almost seems like a thoughtcrime: how can you detect if I thought something wrong, and in our case, how could you detect if I have copied your art? Is there a growing debt on your bank account? Because the key, the character feature of stealing, essential thing on why we call it a bad thing to do is that you, as the creator, lose a copy of your product. You don’t loose anything if someone pirating your product, quite the opposite — you get more recognition. And the more recognition you get, the more valuable your products are.
And back to the purchasing after pirating, even if the pirate won’t pay, even if we take the worst case scenario, where my point is all wrong, and pirating is stealing, who will be the income stolen from? The creator? Three times ha! It would be the corporation. Corporation has already paid the creators for their job, and the corps won’t dense their financing of the creator if his work made a huge success. Well, they could do it, but just a little compared to their income. And if the creator goes, they still have the income. So even now the creator won’t be harmed.
And once again about the social contract, because as far as I can see, you didn’t read my comment properly. Let’s check the more or less common definition of it, and put it in simple words: social contract is a consentive agreement on what you should do and what you shouldn’t. If there’s no penalty mentioned on what if someone don’t follow a rule, the only measure against them will be public disapproval, where banishment is the highest measure of one. In my social environment there is no penalty (judicial or by the crowd) nor public disapproval for piracy. I ask you once again, which social contract am I violating, my dear enlightened monarch? What is in social contract and what isn’t is defined by the current society you’re in. There’s nothing about piracy in mine.
I could also mention that most paid digital products have a free alternatives, and therefore their nominal value falls in the bottomless pit by the rules of economics. I could’ve again repeat about end user’s freedom to copy the product he paid for, and your inability to distinct whether he copied it for himself, or to share it with someone. I won’t cover the problematics of your logic in case if someone “illegally” uses legally obtained software by borrowing someone’s hardware on which the software is stored. My comment is already huge enough, and you haven’t shown any will to understand other one’s point. Just as it was in my analogy earlier, I plant this apple tree in a futile hope that this time it will grow. Why am I doing this? Maybe I just enjoy the gardening, lol.
This is all a bunch of distracted nonsense. If someone pays for it, then they haven’t pirated it. If someone already pirated it, why would they then pay for it? Maybe because they feel guilty and want to support the author? The entire premise behind pirating is that you’re taking/ingesting something without paying for it. Now you’re being dishonest, moving the goalposts of the discussion, and being condescending instead of addressing the actual points. If you can’t have a discussion that sticks to the topic at hand, and have it honestly, there’s no point in engaging with you further.
Grow up dude. Humankind always found sence in most absurd things ever imaginable, and yet you can’t find sense in other people’s speech? You’re either not even trying or your iq is really low.
I answered you on why it’s not that simple, if you want, you can ignore what I say, but don’t pretend your point is right and others are wrong.
Lol. Social contract? It’s not a social contract if it is written in paper by lawyers of only one side. It’s terms of service, which poorly transcribe rules of material world to the world of information.
I could copy your comment, and use it’s text as I would like. Have I stolen your comment? Have I violated social contract between us by doing so?
It is a social contract. We’re not talking about contracts or terms of services. We’re talking about the most basic social contract of any society in existence - you do/give something for/to me in exchange for me doing/giving something for/to you.
Did I make my comment with the expectation that someone would pay for it? No? Then your comment is nonsense.
Yeah, my analogy was bad. Haven’t put enough thought in it. But now that I did thought on the topic, I still can’t agree with you, here’s why:
If we were talking about our good old physical world, you’d be correct. For example we can take such thing as tipping: in the US you absolutely must tip. If I’ll go to the US I still will be expected to leave a tip, even though I’m not a local, and I will absolutely break a social contract if I do otherwise. Kinda obvious.
But here’s a thing: first of all, social contract is a consensus inside of a group. If there’s no consensus, there’s no social contract. There could be some, of course, if we look at a smaller set of people. But, here’s one more: the people in the Internet are not as divided as in real world, they’re all mixed up almost in every way they could be, so there’s no social contracts about the Internet, if we’re talking about it as a the whole of course, and so there are definitely none on the piracy topic. Where I came from, piracy is fine. Where you came from it is almost a crime. We have different social contracts irl.
So yeah, when you said that pirating is a social contract violation, what group of people you meant as the context? Because we’re currently on c/piracy, here it is the norm. And if there was a social contract on the discussed topic on lemmy, there would be no such community as the one we’re currently chatting in.
You could say that piracy violates our agreement on that stealing is bad, I might’ve said that you can’t steal the information, since you’re always only copying the original, but that would be not true. One could steal the information. My point is that piracy is different from stealing. What’s the distinction you may ask? Giving the credit I say. Here is the example: you’re a compositor. I steal your song if I copy it, maybe add some minor details (even though this step is completely optional), and then release it as if it was mine. This is stealing. Cutting webcomics’ watermarks and posting them that way, is also stealing. But if you upload your copy of a product you purchased, without covering original author’s name and claiming it yours, it’s sharing, don’t you think? Louvre pirated Mona Lisa by scanning it and sharing the scan online. You could see Mona Lisa for free. Does it lessen the amount of people wanting to visit the Louvre? I doubt that:)
Your argument is flawed. If you’ve ever purchased any kind of media for money then you are aware of the social contract. If you have a job where you do a service for someone in exchange for money, you are aware of and understand the social contract. The only subsection of people that this wouldn’t apply to is people who have only ever purchased physical goods and never paid for a service and I have to imagine that number is near zero.
As far as the “stealing” comment, you’re stealing the income from the creator. You’re not stealing the media if you’re not depriving someone of it. We can agree on that. If you make use of something without paying for it and it wasn’t given to you as a gift, you are stealing the livelihood from the creator who made it with the expectation that they would be paid for its use. Sharing something in this context is just semantics. If it wasn’t given to you with the intent to be shared, then that’s breaking another social contract.
There’s no other way to put it except that people would stop making art the way they do if they couldn’t make money off it. We live in a world where we need to make a living while trying to make the things we’re passionate about. There are very few people in the chain that make so much money that they can afford to do it while people “share” their work without paying.
And would they? Why are you assuming that pirate is a non-buyer? And have you read what I wrote? Are you really can’t see the problem in your logic, or are you intentionally ignorant because my statements are not to your liking, or because you have too much ego to admit that you are wrong? Just wondering.
Yeah, all your assertions are being disproven by the simple fact that a pirate could still buy the product. And a good pirate will buy the product if everything is to his liking.
Moreover, pirating is a more aggressive competing environment. What does it mean? Art evolution. If you are happened to be a pirate, you try products, and then finance them how ever you would like. It’s almost like a selection in agriculture. You like the sweet apples, but want them to be even sweetier? Select the sweetest of them, plant them, grow them, reiterate until you’re happy. Because now what y’all are planting are all the seeds you have, in a futile hope that the next time you will get lucky.
About all that “lost income” racket. To me it almost seems like a thoughtcrime: how can you detect if I thought something wrong, and in our case, how could you detect if I have copied your art? Is there a growing debt on your bank account? Because the key, the character feature of stealing, essential thing on why we call it a bad thing to do is that you, as the creator, lose a copy of your product. You don’t loose anything if someone pirating your product, quite the opposite — you get more recognition. And the more recognition you get, the more valuable your products are.
And back to the purchasing after pirating, even if the pirate won’t pay, even if we take the worst case scenario, where my point is all wrong, and pirating is stealing, who will be the income stolen from? The creator? Three times ha! It would be the corporation. Corporation has already paid the creators for their job, and the corps won’t dense their financing of the creator if his work made a huge success. Well, they could do it, but just a little compared to their income. And if the creator goes, they still have the income. So even now the creator won’t be harmed.
And once again about the social contract, because as far as I can see, you didn’t read my comment properly. Let’s check the more or less common definition of it, and put it in simple words: social contract is a consentive agreement on what you should do and what you shouldn’t. If there’s no penalty mentioned on what if someone don’t follow a rule, the only measure against them will be public disapproval, where banishment is the highest measure of one. In my social environment there is no penalty (judicial or by the crowd) nor public disapproval for piracy. I ask you once again, which social contract am I violating, my dear enlightened monarch? What is in social contract and what isn’t is defined by the current society you’re in. There’s nothing about piracy in mine.
I could also mention that most paid digital products have a free alternatives, and therefore their nominal value falls in the bottomless pit by the rules of economics. I could’ve again repeat about end user’s freedom to copy the product he paid for, and your inability to distinct whether he copied it for himself, or to share it with someone. I won’t cover the problematics of your logic in case if someone “illegally” uses legally obtained software by borrowing someone’s hardware on which the software is stored. My comment is already huge enough, and you haven’t shown any will to understand other one’s point. Just as it was in my analogy earlier, I plant this apple tree in a futile hope that this time it will grow. Why am I doing this? Maybe I just enjoy the gardening, lol.
This is all a bunch of distracted nonsense. If someone pays for it, then they haven’t pirated it. If someone already pirated it, why would they then pay for it? Maybe because they feel guilty and want to support the author? The entire premise behind pirating is that you’re taking/ingesting something without paying for it. Now you’re being dishonest, moving the goalposts of the discussion, and being condescending instead of addressing the actual points. If you can’t have a discussion that sticks to the topic at hand, and have it honestly, there’s no point in engaging with you further.
tHiS iS aLl a bUnCh oF dIsTrAcTeD nOnSeNsE
Grow up dude. Humankind always found sence in most absurd things ever imaginable, and yet you can’t find sense in other people’s speech? You’re either not even trying or your iq is really low.
I answered you on why it’s not that simple, if you want, you can ignore what I say, but don’t pretend your point is right and others are wrong.
Thank you for proving both my point and that you don’t actually have an argument.