Some of us don’t believe in capitalism though. Why should we prop up an economic system we disagree with?
Radical expropriation for the people!
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Then just say that you’re stealing for the global good. Explain how that is going to work out in the end, as I doubt corporations are going to change or collapse because of piracy.
She just did! FFS. 
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Well, we get free stuff.
You really don’t understand piracy, huh?
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My rule of thumb is that if in no practical sense my acquisition of x creates an actual material deprivation for its “owner,” it ain’t in any practical sense “theft.” If that’s “wrong,” I don’t much care. My morality is based on practical effects, not abstraction.
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It’s not stealing if you don’t believe in the concept of private property.
Rather, the concept of private property is theft of the peoples land and labour.
one of these…
Yes they all have their faults, but capitalism is failing billions of people today.
As if that’s the only thing that we do.
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“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin
“There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own. Nobody. You built a factory out there - good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory… Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea - God bless! Keep a hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”
― Elizabeth Warren
“I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.”
― Eugene Debs
“Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
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It’s a stacked deck of a ‘house of cards’; unsustainable as fuck, but TPTB (and their enablers) will keep try to keep the charade going until it all falls down.
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Wait – if the corporations will keep doing fine despite piracy, then what exactly was the complaint with pirating from them in the first place? 
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We’re not going to have to go back over this whole thing again now, are we?
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I come back to this discussion to see that “property” has once again crept into and overtaken not only the concept of having exclusive control of a physical, single object to the concept of owning the right to even make a duplicate of that object.
My property is the USB stick that the song is on. My property is not the information that my pocket computer can convert into audio waves. That is not property to me, that is information. And more importantly, it is not your property, you only have made an agreement with the creator that only you should be allowed to make copies. And depending on where we live, the rulers may agree that your right has to be respected by me.
I did not steal your medium.
I made a copy of the information on that medium.
I did not steal from you. I flouted your agreement that was supposed to ensure that only you could make copies of the information.
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Is that like Original Sin?
Did we sign it before we were born?
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Which, plot twist, THEY ARE! The culture industry is doing just fine despite wide-spread piracy of their products…
Also, @anon15383236…
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No, it’s just that for many it’s not a binary choice. Many of us have complicated relationships with piracy.
I have many family and friends who work in the entertainment industry. It’s a brutal machine and it’s very hard to strike it rich. Even very successful artists often struggle to make lots of money. The entire profit structure is set up to benefit those in power on the backs of the talent bringing in the money. Things are arguably worse than ever today with streaming rates.
Van Dyke Parks who is a very prolific songwriter, composer, and producer and has worked with top talent through his career tweeted a while back a showing a picture of a royalty check he got from Disney for a whopping $0.58.
He wrote in an article about dwindling royalties that after recording a song with Ringo Starr that if it was streamed 100k times he’d get less than $80 from it. For recording a song with a former Beatle, FFS.
Music is easier than ever to get and there’s fewer excuses than ever to pirate it, yet artists are still getting screwed.
There’s still plenty of stuff out there that’s nearly impossible to get a hold of through the primary market. Either it’s stuck in some sort of licensing purgatory and can’t be sold, or it’s bootleg content that is only ever exchanged through clandestine or illicit means. The artists certainly aren’t profiting from these sales or exchanges (unless they are the ones selling it). But this is often considered “ok” as long as someone’s paying for it even though it’s technically illegal.
Movies are a whole other thing with their own complexities and considerations. More and more streaming services make it more expensive and difficult for consumers to get what they want. Disc formats like Blu-ray and DVD are actively user hostile in so many ways.
Every time I put a Blu-ray into the player, I curse all the time wasted sitting through mandatory copyright notices and FBI warnings, having to skip past trailers, get inundated with various other ads and content I don’t care about, and then after all that get shoved into a slow and difficult to navigate set of menus just to watch the damn film. And if I have to stop the movie and restart it later, it’s a damn miracle if it actually picks up where I left off versus having to go through that whole pre-roll hell again. Every time I go through this hassle I think to myself, “it’s no wonder people pirate films.”
I’m not trying to justify piracy or say it’s ok. I have seen how it can hurt small and independent artists, and how the industry uses it as an excuse to screw talent. I’ve also seen how piracy can drive some positive change in the industry, but naturally the industry always finds a way to leverage it to screw over the talent.
Let’s just say it’s complicated.
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Disclaimer: 100% of my income comes from adtech.
You are correct. People have chosen to justify their behaviour, and their behaviour is to obtain or use something they haven’t paid for. Completely true.
Where things get murkier is when it’s described as “stealing”. Many of these works are virtual. They have no physical value apart from some small pittance of incremental cost to deliver that digital work. That’s important to consider, because where the logical fallacy usually comes from is the idea that a “sale” has been “stolen” in these cases, and that’s very often untrue.
I pirated many a game in my youth, when I was on Social Assistance and had no hope of paying for the actual item any other way. I was not a lost sale. I would never have purchased that item. I have a very hard time believing I “stole” anything in that context. In fact, some of those games I played that way in my youth, I became a huge fan of as a franchise, and chose to pay for and play them and their sequels as an adult, so one could almost look at that process as advertising over the scale of a lifetime.
That being said, I also understand that things cost money to produce, and in this case, the cost to produce these games was not just in distribution, but also in their creation. Obviously if no one paid for the game, no one could get paid.
There’s a similar argument for adblockers. Obviously, you should be in control of what content gets downloaded to your device, and I would never call it “stealing” to do otherwise, however, like with all piracy, you are making a conscious decision not to support the revenue stream of the site you visit by doing so, regardless of the justification. That being said, it isn’t “lost revenue” if the site was so annoying without the adblocker that the person wouldn’t have visited in the first place!
So for me, “stealing” is reserved for those who take physical goods or otherwise cost actual dollars (not potential ones) from creators, and will do my best to support small, independent creators who frankly probably appreciate others getting the word out about them as much as my individual dollars anyway.
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Intellectual property, and really all property, is a monopoly on the output of labor. Like for example, you have two engineers that both create the same device but one files a patent for it and the other doesn’t have any interest in that but builds the device for a small industry use. Why should the engineer who didn’t patent the device be able to use their labor in the production of said device? Because someone filed a piece of paper? It’s the same notion as planting a flag on an island and declaring anyone else who migrates, historically used the land part of the time, or anyone else should not be able to partake in the utility of said island even if yourself can never exhaust its uses. Ultimately, this is the foundational premise of capitalism: having an arbitrary claim enforced by the state through purchase or formal recognition by the state to monopolize some artifact of nature.
Here’s a decent video explaining the contradictions of property and how one should likely go about it (the means are common, the product is exclusive as Proudhon stated).
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