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Pluralistic: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing" (pluralistic.net)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you've already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations.

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[–] 29 points 2 years ago (4 children)

The irony is, you pirating today has been shown to influence you buying it later on in a sale. And there’s a good argument to be made about your word of mouth praise helping their sales.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    Biggest personal examples are Minecraft and FL Studio. I asked my parents to buy Minecraft for me after a week of pirating it, and I bought an FL Studio license when I could afford to, nearly a decade after I first used it. I don't use it much, but it felt right.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    yup, pirated jedi: fallen order. liked the game very much, but jedi: survivor wasn't cracked yet. so i bought a key for 30€.

    the problem is: it runs like shit, because it's a bad PS5 port and denuvo probably also has an effect on that.

    i will never buy from EA again.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago* (3 children)

    Yup. I'm about to suggest about half a dozen people to watch a movie on Netflix I pirated last night. Leave the World Behind. I highly reccomend you see this to understand my last statement here. I have "suggested" to a few dozen people to watch Hulu for Firefly.

    They don't get my money because I don't give a flying fuck to support the extortion of the people this tyrrany that's been running since Crowley and even longer. Looks free but there was never an end to slavery. It just stopped giving a shit about your color. To counter, goes over everyone's head one way or another. Doesn't matter. All life will die on this planet in less than a decade.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Holy moly that comment took a turn.

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  • [–] -1 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Yeah, but did you get it at the "counter?"

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    No, I don't get it.

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  • [–] -1 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    The counter is that the slavery of everyone doesn't mean they're "not racist" by applying slavery "to white people too." They've been enslaving white people since way before we came to the US. I am, by family, English & Irish. So just because I'm blond, blue and white don't mean I'm not ready to WAR against slavery by the corporations or any bullshit hedgemony. Democratic party is as guilty as the republicans and their claim to fight is just sucker lies. They don't fight shit for real and Biden is just Trumps most active cock sucking bitch.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    I don't mean this in any disrespectful way at all, but I'm completely missing the context of what you're trying to tell me and genuinely have no idea what you're talking about.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    Then ask questions. I have no problem helping to understand but if you're just wavng wide wand agians the whole shebang then say goodbye with your ignorance.

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  • [+] -8 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    As every musician knows, exposure is always better than payment! This is why you shouldn't offer payment to musicians at your wedding, since they're getting great exposure already. /s

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    That's two very different cases. Using exposure to extort services out people is different than copying something to see if you'd enjoy it.

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  • [–] -2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    It's really not that different. The main difference is the audience size. For an independent musician selling merchandise, it would be equally insulting to them to tell them that they will be repaid in exposure if they give you one for free.

    Making a copy of something "to see if you'd enjoy it" or because it's somehow great for their exposure is mental gymnastics to justify piracy. Let's just call it intellectual property theft and stop beating around the bush.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Copying isn't theft. You're about 40 years late to this conversation and you're starting from the taste of boots? You're equating an instantly reproducible, finished product with a service; your analogy sucks.

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  • [–] -4 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    The entire goal of my comment was to avoid mincing words. As somebody who has first hand experienced copyleft violation, it sure doesn't feel different on the receiving end. I feel this very personal experience is equivocal to copyright infringement. I'm not licking any boots—thanks for that accusation.

    It's easy to excuse illicit behavior from your armchair by gaslighting with the choice of words, because after all, violating copyright is just sticking it to the man, right? In truth, I feel that my software was stolen for profit and just for me as the little man, there's no other word that comes to my mind than "theft."

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    You should write an open letter to hobbyists. It worked for Gates. If your software was "stolen for profit" and that didn't result in more people trying it and buying, I have bad news: it didn't seem like it was worth the money to the people who tried it. JRC does many studies on piracy and the data shows that total sales are not displaced by piracy volume, again and again. You can make the argument that this is only true for games and music (typically the subject of these studies) but this hardline attitude of it being the same as stealing sucks.

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  • [–] -2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Lovely, so your rebuttal is that not only is my emotion wrong but my software sucks, too. I would suggest putting yourself in my shoes and envisioning what a shitty thing that is to say.

    To offer a bit of background: the clone my game published itself on Google Play with ads removed. Aside from simply the confusion of a game with verbatim the same name, this further entices users to install it, because Google Play displays a label when an app contains ads.

    What is the worth to a user? This is a terrific question, and I have spent years narrowing down the right valuation of ad content and in-app purchase pricing to remove ads. The game currently has 15M historical installs with fairly industry standard retention rates, so it can't be completely off. But the thing is, that valuation will always be higher than 0.

    So where does the steal come from? The cloned app only offered the ad-free experience long enough to gather enough installs, to then revert the change with a swapped out AdMob account number.

    I think most of this has been offset by that change now as I've seen a similar growth return to my app. But those losses in the interim period are gone forever. Somebody took my code base, republished it in blatant violation of GPL, causing me to lose revenue. I feel robbed and your apathy genuinely perplexes me.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    In that case it would be illegal

    Yap about my own crimes:

    In my opinion that would be immoral. For me, the only things I’ve pirated are mom’s cd’s (ripped) and Endorphin Dynamic Motion Synthesis. Endorphin physics is 20+ year old abandoned and discontinued software, it was a physics engine for film studios with a learning edition: 30 day free trial. Yes, it is a copy for my own enjoyment, but there was never a purchase to be made. I tried looking for the old web servers, but after NaturalMotion was bought by Zinga in 2015, they shut down all servers and effectively erased it from history. Only 2 companies legally know the secrets of this Dynamic Motion Synthesis: NaturalMotion/Zynga and Rockstar. Rockstar has a branch of it for games called Euphoria, I think it still exists. If no-one had cracked Endorphin, no trace of its existence would have stayed, effectively removed from reality. I now need windows 7 and a vm lol. The music mom had already bought, mp3players don’t support discs.

    Yap about your game’s copycat:

    How many ads? If there’s a lot ads it makes sense someone would rip it, though it still sucks. If there’s almost none, they’re very obviously in the wrong HOWEVER it’s more complicated than this and I obviously don’t know the details when all you said about it was you made it, had some ads, someone ripped it/reuploaded without ads, so I can’t really say much about it. Sorry that happened, it must suck, though I don’t know much about software dev.

    Piracy is definitely a gray topic with valid points on either side so my interpretation of your game situation is probably inaccurate and where the line is drawn changes person to person. Have a great day.

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