Is torrent piracy really a crime (without trying to deny that legally it is) ?
Question by – –: Is torrent piracy really a crime (without trying to deny that legally it is) ?
Like I said, I’m not denying it being breaking the law with big trouble for you if you spread copyrighted stuff via BitTorrent for instance, but in your opinion how much harm is it?
Let’s put it this way – I once knocked onto a forum, where a certain program was discussed and somebody asked for help about it while somehow mentioning that he had torrented it. One of the honest buyers immediately stormed him with “…torrenting it is just like stealing it off a store shelf.” Now everybody ought to understand that even if you did pirate a program , NEVER mention it on a forum ;), but I should point out that it isn’t exactly like stealing it off a store shelf in the sense that all he got was an exact copy of an online store item which many others have downloaded after paying and no box material or transportation fees ever went into that exact copy specifically.
This is where I’ll point out that of course somebody needs to get payed for compiling the program (which is far from an easy task) and if everybody just pirated it , the maker would just go bankrupt. But, if you think about it, isn’t buying a non-material form of information, like a movie or something , online simply getting it free and donating the price to the makers to fund their continuous work? What if even without it being available as a torrent, I wouldn’t buy it no matter how I wanted it and simply got it this way because it was free? It’d mean that I wouldn’t have payed anyway, but didn’t cause any material damage by getting it this way either. You heard of this Deviance thing going on around torrenting sites? It’s this group of computer users who release free torrents of games while always adding this message to a readme file that comes along – “After playing it, buy it. We did.” And that’s the golden truth – if you want the makers to make a good sequal, some other good product or improve the existing , go ahead and pay them! They need it to continue work, bring the bread on the table and pay their bills ;). But if you just get a copy like in the instance afore mentioned, is it bad? Better yet, what if the program has an active online community going about it and by getting it this way you simply start actively taking part in it, contributing to it aso. while not having enough money to buy it in any imaginable closer time? I mean software isn’t food – you don’t NEED it, so pirating it can’t be called disrupting the economy of highly necessary goods. In fact making it is just taking the risk of no-one bothering to buy it anyway, unless of course you’re fulfilling the people’s hidden desires and cutting a buck of of it ;), which of course isn’t part of the overall economy’s backbone. So, yeah.
If you read all the mumbo-jumbo above, you probably understood that I’m not trying to initiate some crazy revolution against copyright but just squeezing out your opinions ;). So, who’s first?
By the way, I’ll note that in a broad sense I only meant entertainment based stuff. I just didn’t want to put the word “game” everywhere so’s you’d think I’m a big Quake junkie X).
Best answer:
Answer by Da Komrade!
My opinion is that if you have to go through all of this rationalizing to justify an action in your mind, then it’s obviously wrong. The product isn’t yours, the people who produced it put time and effort into it for the purpose of selling it, and it is their property. If you take it without paying for it, it’s theft.
Let me expand on my comment. Look at it this way. If you put in the work and effort to learn how to create software, music, writing, art, or any other product for the purpose of selling it for a profit, it is not ethical or legal to take someone else’s work and use it for your own benefit unless the person gives it to you or you pay for it. While Marxian theory does question this perspective, Marxian theory is not what our society is founded upon. In fact, most modern philosophers admit that Marxian thought is every bit as flawed as pure capitalist thought because it is in essence anti-capitalism and starts from what they see as a fundamentally flawed position since it is specifically based on a supposedly flawed perspective as its foundation. That said, what Marx never really admitted was possible is that human nature is naturally more attuned to capitalist free-market society. Marx believed that our current free-market system evolved from a natural state of communism with nature and others into a self-perpetuating free-market industrial society, but never proffered why exactly this happened. I argue it happened because that is the nature of mankind’s social evolution. As Durkheim said, we feel the need to sense some benefit from our actions that extend from the here and now, which communist thought doesn’t address. Profit and ownership helps fulfill this need for some tangible lasting benefit. In my mind, to take the labor of another person without making proper compensation is basically taking the essence of their existence because the product is the tangible result of human ideas and action.
Add your own answer in the comments!
