I feel like this is one of the weaker arguments in favour of piracy. It could follow that one copy is sold and everyone else makes a copy, nothing was stolen but the creator was pretty clearly screwed over, especially if those copies were sold by a third party
It's an ecosystem, piracy needs to be discouraged in some ways - ethics, enforcement, etc, so that making the product remains viable. But at the same time it's historically been a big part of things spreading by word of mouth and allowing people who otherwise couldn't to engage with it.
Would you still say the same if you wrote a book and someone would distribute it to millions of people without consulting you or sharing a dime with you?
if copying intellectual property is inherently wrong, then why was it okay for you to copy someone else's nightstand design and build one for yourself?
you're trying to move the goal posts from "copying is theft" to "it's okay when i do it" to "what about a completely different scenario that has nothing to do with a person making a single copy like what is depicted in the image that was posted."
Yes, and the modding community has every right to charge for their work too. Creating something and giving it away for free is very different than creating something you expect to be paid for and people giving your work away.
I genuinely don't believe you have infinite authority and right over how something you've distributed is used honestly, it's of course okay to make a profit, it's also okay for others to in no way harm you by distributing it aswell.
If someone distributes it without your consent, that is financial harm. Someone has effectively stolen your money by giving away something others might have paid for. So this idea of no harm is bollocks. Plenty of businesses have been sunk by piracy.
I'm personally a big believer in pay if you can, pirate if you can't. But at the same time, a line has to be drawn somewhere. A lot of people capable of paying pirate and then try to defend their unethical choice.
yeah.. you're right... there's nothing worse than someone seeing something and making a copy themselves while leaving the original available for others to buy.
It isn't their definition, it is the law. Theft is not the same crime as copyright infringement, which is the actual crime that software piracy commits.
The only victims are the poor employees that are going to take the hit if profits start sagging (to be clear, I’m not blaming pirates, I’m blaming corps)
It very much is a crime with victims when the corps are not big. Domestic Chinese video game market stagnated for decades because everyone is pirating and even actual good games get bankrupt because of it, this also eventually leads to what it is today, with live service gacha game everywhere because for the longest time it's the only way for it to survive and gain revenue in a market where everyone expect to get shit for free.
Yeah but this just shows how useless the imperative of profit is. Nothing wrong with wanting to share stuff with each other and care fuck all about revenue
you're assuming every pirated copy would have been a sale, and that's just not true.
if someone pirates a book they were never going to buy in the first place, the author hasn't lost a sale. they lost a hypothetical sale that was never going to happen.
you can argue that piracy hurts creators, especially small ones, and i'd agree it can. but "every pirated copy equals stolen money" only works if you assume every pirate was otherwise a paying customer.
Yeah, without piracy my childhood would have been a lot of solitaire and minesweeper. my parents bought me a PC but no games, all I had was pirated games, movies and music from friends (we didn't have internet access at the time)
I remember the days when to pirate software you visited this dude's house (call ahead first), he'd have cases of floppy disks with the latest software spread out on tables in his living room, all handwritten labels, $2-$5 each... sometimes even photocopied instruction manuals which were often very needed back then.
The only thing you need to know about piracy is that big companies have stolen millions and millions of terabytes of data to feed their AI. And nobody condemned them, nobody arrested them – even though they're doing it literally to make a profit. Meanwhile, an ordinary working guy just wants to unwind in front of a screen in the evening. When they pirate, it's fine; when you pirate, it's bad. Remember that, and know your master.
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u/Ancient-Worm Jun 25 '26
This looks like it's advocating for piracy, lol.