Can proprietary software be justified?
What’s the justification for not allowing me to make a copy? Those who decry piracy call it theft, but it’s not theft since they aren’t losing anything. Not a physical product they could run out of, nor a potential sale as has been shown time and time again; people who pirate a thing generally wouldn’t have purchased the thing anyway.
This is the only correct answer.
Yes. Next stupid question.
yes but why is probably the bulk of it…
I am not stealing. It’s there, I take it and it’s still there. Don’t know why these posts keep popping up in piracy communities. Same plague was there on reddit too. Like seriously it’s 2025.
Its almost like you think pirating something has no effect on anything.
Yes
Everyone has already given their response so there’s nothing really to add other than, well, there’s lots of reasons to justify piracy. Most of them are even provided by the publishers / distributors themselves!
Also it’s weird to browse the top 10 responses or even below, and NOT see this xkcd posted or even linked. What is going on, Lemmy?
why is anyone still trying to justify piracy? that’s step 2 of a conversation that even non-criminals are on step 9 in
Believe it or not, I’ve met people like this. I know a guy who was worried about showing a movie to our Meetup group.
Not because he was afraid of getting caught. He thought it might be unethical.
it’s crazy how worried normal everyday people are worried about accidentally hurting the feelings of corporations. especially post-covid.
To be fair, I think it’s because they equate it with stealing. The propaganda works. Most people think that stealing is wrong, and media corporations have put a lot of money into convincing people that filesharing = stealing. Hell, even people who are okay with filesharing call it “piracy”, because that’s the corporate framing they were brought up with. (Just look at the name of this sub.)
Richard Stallman calls this out in this essay:
The term “piracy” is used by record companies to demonize sharing and cooperation by equating them to kidnaping, murder and theft.
I mean, yes, I enjoy saying “yarr”, and “yo-ho-ho”, and all the rest of it, but I have to admit that’s the result of a successful propaganda campaign. Before people called it “piracy”, they called it “filesharing”. And, of course, that was a problem, because everybody knows that sharing is good and should be encouraged; but piracy is evil and should be stopped.
Hey wow! A headline that isn"t answered with “no”.
in journalism they teach you to only do headlines with a question if the answer is no, otherwise just make it say “piracy is justified”.
obviously this guy is a musician and not a journalist, and as such, actually thinking about things he makes….
(i like his other videos too)That’s what I was referring to. Thank you for elucidating it, though, for others that may not have known.
I bought a quite expensive piece of animation software (that cost over $1000) to use professionally. The specific term it was sold to me under was a “perpetual license.” I took this to mean “never ending”, which is the dictionary definition of the word “perpetual.” You can probably guess where this is going.
A few years later, in the middle of a professional project, it stopped working. I contacted support, and was told that they changed the way they were doing licenses so I’d have to buy a new one (at almost double the price) or eat shit. I’m paraphrasing, but that was the gist of it.
So yeah, if you’re thinking of buying a Toon Boom Harmony perpetual license, maybe save yourself a lot of money and hassle and just pirate it instead. Or tell them to get fucked and use their direct competitor. I have done both.
It IS justified lol.
Short answer: Yes.
Longer answer: easily yes.
Medium answer: you bet.
Profane answer: heck yes
Street answer: Hellz yiih
French Answer: Mais Oui 🥖🥸
German answer: jawohl!
Huh. Based on the community this was posted in, I can assume that the answer the video comes to is “yes” and not watch it. But according to Betteridge’s law of headlines the answer is “no.” I need to argue about this without watching it but I don’t know what stance to argue about.
Ah! I’ll use the Orbit plugin to get an AI to summarize the video for me. Hm. The AI-generated summary says the video describes an anecdote about music copyright violations, talks about some ethical considerations about both music and software piracy, and then:
The speaker concludes by acknowledging the complexity of the issue and the importance of considering the perspectives of all parties involved.
So I guess the answer was “Maybe?” How am I supposed to have a pointless Internet argument about “Maybe?”
Bah. Someone attack me for using AI, at least that’s a debate I can sink my teeth into.
Lazy prick! Should have just put the video on in the background while doing dishes, or do what I did and briefly skim the comments for someone to fight with! AI is dumb, it’s not even named effectively and you’re dumb for using it and a sheeple for calling it AI in the first place!
Fight me! ❤️Joke’s on you, I have a dishwasher machine! Robots do my dishes for me too! It is you who is the dumb one, having to labor manually as you do!
Ah, there we go. Thanks.
And now I’m here to fight with both of you, not about what you’re arguing about, but I’m going to police your tone and call you both stupid because you didn’t argue in the arbitrary fashion I’ve determined is “correct!”
This is the least helpful contribution I can make, while simultaneously attacking you both!
Is it to early to drop in and call everyone Nazis or nah?
Fuck! How did I miss the most unhelpful option?
Educated guess: your brain isn’t wired to be useless in an conversation
You used the wrong word for “two early!” Worse than Nazi!
Something something literally Hitler?
Is this the online equivalent of fisticuffs?
No worries fam, I got you.
I want the stuff, the stuff is there. I take it. The stuff is still there, nothing was lost, nothing was stolen.
Me at the grocery store
Except the second half
Same. And for some reason I can’t seem to lose weight.
Oh I was joking about theft lol
You’re not stealing stuff, you’re stealing revenue. The missing revenue is what they care about. But they have plenty of that already, so they can get bent
Stealing revenue it’s hypothetical, because it supposes that you were going to pay for the product if it wasn’t available pirated. And that is far from being certain.
That is very true, but that doesn’t stop them from going after piracy to protect the revenue
Not really, it’s just free publicity.
Unless their product is shit, of course, and no one would pay for it after trying or recommend it to others… in which case, fuck them, they deserve it for attempting to sell shit.
- It’s morally good when people access information, culture, and entertainment.
- It’s morally good when the author of a work gets rewarded by their work.
Piracy is morally justified when 1 is a more pressing matter than 2. As such, it’s justified in situations like this:
- If, in the absence of piracy, the pirate would still not pay for the goods - because #2 is set up to zero (the author of the work is not rewarded anyway).
- If it’s impossible to obtain the goods without piracy. For example, abandonware.
- If the author of the work would get breadcrumbs of the money used to access legally the goods, and the pirate compensates the author directly (e.g. donation).
Nuance seems rare in these posts sometimes, I appreciate your post!
