Recording from free to air is legal because of the "time shifting" argument. The show is being broadcast regardless, just because it's at an inconvenient time for you doesn't mean you should have to miss it. It's also worth noting that media producers fought tooth and nail against this.

Remember that there were also big campaigns against tape recorders and VCR. They even managed to get VCR vendors to implement a feature that prevents users from skipping ads. So it's not like it's simply legal, the media corps were just not as successful in their lobbying as they are today.

I don't subscribe to the logic but I guess a part of it can be the lossless factor. Quality of pirated digital content is exactly like the original. If you tape something it usually loses quality. So people seem to care less about that kind of piracy. Which is stupid since going for lossy compressed pirated videos is allegedly not less wrong in the face of law.

I think you mean this one

lol. You give an ad spot way too much credit

Thanks for that trip down memory lane. I was just a child when I saw that, and my first thought was "but... But when I steal from someone, they don't have it anymore. If I download it, they still have it"

Call it "illegal copy" (because fuck customer rights with "usage licenses") and we're good.

No, free market isn't "supposed" to self regulate. That's silliness. The only people who say that have no understanding of the concepts.

Regulation is required. Unfortunately with regulatory capture it's not happening.

It's not stealing if it's been stolen before! Arrr

The industry argument for that is "you're stealing our potential revenue". I personally subscribe to one streaming service. That's it. If what I want to watch isn't on that, I hoist the anchor and set sail.

The predictable way that video streaming services became content islands and actually a worse user experience than cable really shows how the industry would rather provide worse experience and cash grab than attract more customers naturally. By contrast, I can subscribe to one music service, and listen to literally every artist I can possibly want to. As soon as video streaming does that (at a reasonable price), piracy for video will plummet like it did for music.

The long and short of the argument is "fuck the people who farm everyone else's efforts for millions. They don't own ideas or information."

Someone ripped off your YouTube video you worked hard on? I'm mad. Motherfucker cropped out your watermark and everything!

Someone copy your big budget movie? I don't give a fuck. You're Fox who makes it their business to lie to everyone and buy up control.

I don’t get why my fellow pirates try so hard to justify what they’re doing. We want something and we don’t want to pay the price for it because it’s either too expensive or too difficult, so we go the cheaper, easier route. And because these are large corporations trying to fuck everyone out of every last dime, we don’t feel guilt about it.

Justification is important to those who act against unethical systems. You have to separate the opportunists from the rest. An opportunist will loot any defenseless shop without the slightest sense of ethics. That’s not the same group as those who either reject an unjust system or specifically condemn a particular supplier (e.g. Sony, who is an ALEC member and who was caught unlawfully using GPL code in their DRM tools). Some would say it’s our ethical duty to do everything possible to boycott, divest, and punish Sony until they are buried.

We have a language problem that needs sorting. While it may almost¹ be fair enough to call an opportunist a “pirate” who engages in “piracy”, these words are chosen abusively as a weapon against even those who practice civil disobedience against a bad system.

1. I say /almost/ because even in the simple case of an opportunistic media grab, equating them with those who rape and pillage is still a bit off (as RMS likes to mention).

I think you see the same problem with the thread title that I do - it’s clever but doesn’t really give a solid grounds for ethically driven actions. But it still helps to capture the idea that paying consumers are getting underhandedly deceptively stiffed by crippled purchases, which indeed rationalizes civil disobedience to some extent.

We should call it archiving instead of piracy to be honest.

In five years, they'll be telling us it's stealing not to go see the latest marvel movie.

People who assert property rights (including limited monopoly rights on intellectual property) are doing mental gymnastics too. We're just used to them, thanks to a century of propaganda after the great depression.

The current state of wealth distribution a century later doesn't seem to carry the promise that capitalism can be fair.

In fact, IP maximalism (Thanks, Walt!) has denied the public a robust public domain, and our courts struggle to do the mental gymnastics to understand why we have a public domain in the first place.

That is to say, the US and EU have totally lost the plot.

If I were to steal cable, I would be using the cable company's resources to deliver content to my house without paying for it. If I were to set up an inductor under a power line to steal power, I would be depriving the power company of power they could have sold to somebody else without giving them anything in return.

When I torrent something, I don't even put any additional load on Netflix's servers. With their current monetization scheme I don't even make the show's producers any less money.

It's not theft though. When you steal something you deprive someone else of it.

It's just copyright infringement. Since copyright is an artificial temporary monopoly granted by the government, it's pretty different from "theft".

We're sharing.

Like Robin Hood, but in a pirate ship.

Yarr we be murdering the media, just call it murder me matey.