T is for Torrent.
Sesame Street (2015 Ep 1) x264 DvDRip AC3 5.1 ESub [DDR]
Not sure I love how stealing things is described as basically a lead-in to piracy–as much as the corporations would like to make us think so, the two are not related. Stealing $5.00 from your sleeping friend? Indefensible. Downloading a copy of a game or program (especially in the days when there weren’t the free options that there are now) that you didn’t have the money to have bought anyway? Fine.
For most people the world will treat them like crap, our current economic model will get you to slave away and pay for things you can barely afford and then throw onto a crappy benefit system (if you’re lucky) when your mind snaps from all the pressures. If you can afford to support authors, film makers etc go ahead, many people can’t and shouldn’t be deprived of some relief from daily drudgery. Us lot who share copies of tv programs and games and films and books are just passing the time, if you want to find the real crooks look to those exploiting us all.
I don’t feel any guilt at all for accessing things in an unauthorised fashion, they’re usually of higher quality too (IE no drm).
PS I shout about the things I like even if I pirated them, in my book that is free advertising. So yes, no guilt here.
PPS I’m not totally anti-people making money, I disabled my ad blocker last week and install privacy badger instead so that only ads tracking me are blocked.
When I was a kid (this was before video games and PCs were common) my parents didn’t have much money for books and such things, even knowing I was a pretty voracious reader (yeah, I also tried the read-the-whole-encyclopedia thing) who could read way above his grade level. But I was lucky in one respect–our town had a pretty decent public library, and my mother somehow managed to get them to give me a library card with adult privileges, knowing the kid’s room wasn’t going to cut it for me. But of course, many are not so lucky. Such resources are woefully underfunded in most places, and nonexistent in the places where they might do the most good.
Came to say very nearly the same thing. Copying data is not stealing. When you stole five dollars, you made somebody five dollars poorer. When you copy data, it’s still right there.
And the very worst word to describe it is piracy. Pirates kill people and take over their ships. Nintendo wants to make you think you’ve killed them and taken over - but you haven’t. Nobody has died. We need to remove the word piracy from this conversation completely. When you let your opponents frame the debate, you’ve already surrendered.
At worst it’s a Tragedy of the Commons. But in reality it’s probably not even that bad.
I personally don’t mind the term, only because I think the word “pirate” has moved away from the bloodier, rapier images over the years and instead has an alternate connotation that brings to mind a family friendly, Robin Hood like, free-spirit that makes up his/her own rules. There’s a cool factor to it that I don’t think hurts at all. When I hear “pirate” I don’t think “historical blackbeard”. I think Johnny Depp, or Dread Pirate Roberts from Princess Bride.
That said, there’s tons of other terms that could be used instead: Cloned. Checked out. Made a copy. Downloaded. Shared.
But for god’s sake, people need to quit with the “stealing” shit. That term should never be left unchallenged when used to describe copying data or you’re exactly right: we’ve let the opponents frame the debate in their own negative way.
Pirates are still very real, and they do exactly that.
Yeah. Not denying that. Just saying in the public mind, the word “pirate” doesn’t evoke those things–especially when used in this context. The word has taken on other meanings, as words often do, rooted in the popular stories and depictions of pirates. Which is what Pirate Bay, and other’s describing themselves as such, are invoking when they use the term for themselves. Not Somali pirates. Errol Flynn pirates.
True that.
Jolly Roger up, and cannons out!
Funny, I copied my partner’s essay and submitted it before him. I got an A, he got a 0.
Then he had the gall to get angry about it, even when he still had the essay right there!.
All I did was take away the right to exploit his labors as he saw fit. Not stealing at all!
Seriously, it all comes down to the same thing. Anything that harms me and my friends is bad. Anything that enriches me and my friends is good. Tribalism at its finest.
Woah. You misrepresented something you didn’t write as your own? Lucky you didn’t get busted. Pretty shitty thing to do.
Tell me, though. What does that cool story have to do with this thread again?
Not the same thing at all. Your example is in a sense academic piracy - copying without permission that you then use for personal gain - and a rather extreme example at that, as it did prevent the creator from making use of it, something that even piracy doesn’t usually do entirely. (Not even counting the separate issue of plagiarism on top of that.) The “piracy” that’s being discussed in the article is actually just copyright violation, not piracy, and in this context has no impact on the creator’s ability to exploit their work whatsoever.
Relatively comparable to the story.
Jumped the track and became an entirely different thing.
A comparable thing would be “I learned for the exam from a xerox of an expensive book”.
Yeah. The majority of the article makes it clear that the closest analog to piracy is more the library. It just so happens that libraries luckily came into being before IP law became disproportionately in favor of the IP holding corporations rather than in favor of the public or culture. So newer media, especially games, are much less freely and democratically available to our country’s people than books are. Piracy was the author’s way of gaining similar free access to forms of culture too litigiously locked down to be democratically available through libraries. Which is totally different than the petty theft described elsewhere, though the underlying motivating factor of poverty is the same, of course.
This mirrors my own childhood growing up in a rural area pretty closely. Before satellite television and cheap dial-up internet became options, it was weekly family visits to the library. I’d nearly forgotten how good a library system I had access to. I’m now retroactively very grateful to both the system and to my mother for introducing me to it.
I don’t get it. What’s the giant mu referencing? (Or is it some kind of bad pun on mewing/mewling?)
