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Originally posted by: denjet78
Piracy is what you make of it.
And that's the beginning of the idea I was talking about earlier in this thread.
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Certain people will always pirate simply because they can. It has nothing to do with cost. There will always be some level of piracy.
It's always hard for me to read text, because I can see several meanings in the words. Thus, I cannot tell if you are saying this as a cold fact, or as a justification.
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These same companies are also constantly in the action of trying to limit your rights as consumers. Of trying to find new ways to force you to buy what they want you to buy how they want you to buy it. And they'll do it any way they can. They don't care what's right or what's fair. They only care about how they're going to be able to squeeze you for a few extra cents the next time. And then the next, and the next, and the next.
First off, at no point should it be phrased as an adversarial relationship. The fact that I hear this all over the net always gives me a little shock, because this is thrown out like it's valid. For the grand part of it all, the relationship is still the same it has always been: someone sells you something, and you want to buy it. I understand that things like DRM and the like are being put in place SOLELY to protect the companies and their IP, but that is NEVER a reason you should go off and start intentionally circumventing them.
For example, NBC was selling their shows on iTunes up until a few months ago. Their main reason for leaving? They weren't getting enough money per sale. They pressured Apple to raise the prices, but Apple refused. So NBC took their ball and went home, complained about how "there's pirated content on XX% of iPods out there," and started their own venture - Hulu.com (which has been an astounding failure so far).
One of the comments on digg.com about this whole thing? "Well, I used to buy their shows, but now I bittorrent."
You know, that's twisted logic. You COULD get something, and you STILL CAN get something, but now you might have to pay a higher price, so all of a sudden it's COMPLETELY ok to steal it?
You know, at my grocery store, Fuji apple prices all over the place. One week it's 79 cents a pound, the next week it's 1.19, then it's 1.39, and then it's on sale for 59, etc etc. By the above logic, once it goes over 1.19, I ought to be allowed to steal it, since those darn farmers sure are a bunch of bitches trying to limit my right to cheap apples.
The point is that all of this is ENTERTAINMENT. You don't need any of it. And the moment you start throwing out this weak justification about how "omfg, teh companies r steelin my torrentz" and the like, it completely breaks down.
You said earlier to call it what you will. It doesn't matter - it's pirating, it's getting something for free you OUGHT to have paid money for. There is absolutely no other way around it, and to sit back and claim the companies are evil, and thus two wrongs make a right, doesn't make you look correct. Oh sure, it's a socially acceptable answer, but that doesn't mean it's completely correct.
Final anecdote: I have a friend in the military. He does contracting work for them. He's one of the most straight lace people I've ever met. And even he sits down and pirates PSOne games, every DVD and TV show he can get his hands on, and has gigs of emulators. The funny thing is that he brags about how much money he makes and how simple his job is. Meanwhile, I make less money as an English grad (and most likely always will), but I buy everything I want. And even though he's a good friend, I still give him sh*t about it. He never has any answer for me.
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Just because something is codified in law that doesn't make it right.
Is anyone arguing this? Because I see this response all over the place too.
Don't pretend that I'm giving these companies a pass for things like DRM, because I'm not. If you own a CD, you ought to be able to rip it to your iPod, stream it over a wireless network, etc. But that's a world apart from downloading it and giving it to everyone on your buddy list.
Again, this is entertainment. If you want to be totally Draconian about it, you don't really have that many rights. You have the right to buy it and use it in the manner it's meant to be used in. You have the right to get it replaced if it breaks prematurely. You technically have the right to back it up in case of unforeseen disasters. But you don't suddenly have the right to do absolutely anything you want with it JUST BECAUSE you own it, because then that's essentially asking for complete and total carte blanche.
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If tomorrow the government passed a law stating that everyone had to purchase a copy of such-and-such DVD for whatever cost the company wanted to charge, would everyone here agree with it and just do as they're told simply because it's a "law"?
Throwing out hypothetical situations that don't have ANY CHANCE AT ALL of ever happening doesn't make your arguments any stronger. It actually makes them weaker, because you have to resort to throwing out completely nonsense that preys on the feeble imaginations of people around you.
Also, I can do the same thing. What if every entertainment company stopped distributing their merchandise in any retailer channels, and instead forced you to have to be registered with them, and further forced you to actually physically travel to a place of their choosing, where you had to present them a sort of ID card that THEY only had the power to authorize, and only THEN could you buy their product? And what if we take it a step further and say that they could look at your records, and actually refuse to sell it to you, because they found out you used an emulator back in the day?
I can take this "what if" a
lot further, by the way.
Topic: This really pissed me off (Read 14961 times)
