[throwaway77384]

I wonder whether people who defend piracy also defend making money with it.

That tends to be where I draw the line (except for perhaps very extenuating circumstances). For me, piracy without profit motive is literally just knowledge / information sharing. I feel as though copyright basically shouldn't exist in cases where someone doesn't profit from reproducing / copying / distributing some kind of content.

As soon as someone starts making money with someone else's creation, it becomes a crime in my view.

I understand that there is nuance to this...what if someone runs a torrent site and needs funding to keep running the site, thus technically creating some kind of cash-flow / revenue stream. I don't really have the answer to that (except perhaps that we should all just use open-source DHT-based torrent searches, so no funding of centralised sites is needed?)

But yeah, in cases where someone is this blatantly operating an IPTV service, it's obvious why they got prosecuted.

[wil421]

I’ve felt the same since the time of CD burners. If someone gave me a blank disc I would burn whatever mix tape they wanted. There were kids charging $10-$15 per custom mix but I always thought it was not cool. Then when I saw one of the teen girls on trial for MP3 sharing I decided to keep everything for my self.

Pay for Plex schemes are similar to the CD selling of the 2000s.

[parineum]

> I wonder whether people who defend piracy also defend making money with it.

I don't really specifically defend those that make money from piracy as I generally view it as unethical but I do patronize them. Ironic? Maybe but it goes back to the old "service issue" thing. As an example, I've been trying to watch the NHL legally for years. I've gone back and forth between legal and pirate methods as either legal rules change, the service suffers in some way or regional blackouts become unworkable for me.

The biggest issue is the blackouts, which require a second service (VPN or otherwise) and a lot of hoops to jump through to even get that working.

The newest issue is that the NHL went from providing their own service to partnering with Disney/ESPN+. However, that resulted in degraded service because ESPN+ doesn't have rights to as much as the NHL service used to. National games are generally no longer supported. A game on ESPN is not on ESPN+.

Another issue is that I hate being funneled through an app that takes me 12 clicks to get to what I want so that I can be guided through a tour of other content I don't want but I deal with that as long as it works.

IPTV solved these issues for me. The problem the legal providers now have is that I know how easy it could be. They essentially need to provide me with and M3U and an EPG (or similar) for me to consider going back to them. Given that the direction they've been going seems to be away from that, I don't hold out hope that is on the horizon.

[thomastjeffery]

Copyright is an artificial monopoly. If someone doesn't believe in the validity of copyright, then it's no stretch of the imagination that they could feel ethical competing with it.

After all, it's not like rightsholders are actually going to make a competitive service from a vacuum.

[93po]

This is my take, I have zero respect for the concept of intellectual property and care not at all if people make money from piracy. I don't think Disney is going to notice the lost subscription revenue from 50,000 people.

[teddyh]

If someone made money from piracy, and this was made legal, would not market forces kick in and lower the market price to the cost of labour?

Maybe it’s the “someone else's creation” bit that bothers you? But that is begging the question! If copyright were to be eliminated, it would not be, by definition, someone else’s creation. The actual creators may have the right to be associated with (i.e. be credited as the creators of) the original work (eliminating plagiarism and making fraud even more illegal), but the work itself could be monetized in whatever way anyone sees fit, by anyone.

[bombcar]

It's a gray area, no matter what you think about it. Modding a console? Paying someone to do the same mod for you?

When it gets to "becoming a company providing similar services" is across the line; if that is legal then there's nothing stopping YouTube from just ripping all content forever and profiting?

What if the company is selling hardware that is obviously used for pirated content? How would this apply to things like the iPod?

In general, what we have is that big players in the piracy profit area get taken down, small to tiny players do not.

[jorvi]

Modding a console is so much different from piracy.

Modchips often enable piracy, but in essence they're just freeing your device. It's like removing the SIM lock from a phone.

[carlosjobim]

Maybe in theory there is a gray zone, but in practice I don't know any examples where you'd be hard pressed to say wether they crossed the line or not.

[api]

My opinion on the whole subject of piracy has changed really radically since I was younger. I'm not really a fan of it at all, even without making money, and with making money I think it's definitely not a good thing.

The thing that really changed my mind was realizing that the phrase "information wants to be free" just means "intellectual labor will be free." In other words a world where there is no copyright and piracy is standard would be one in which no form of intellectual labor can be compensated.

In an economy that is increasingly dematerialized, this is a recipe for extreme wealth disparity and a return to feudalism. Only the owners of physical property would have any ability to earn anything outside service labor. You'd have landlords, large capital-owning corporations, banks, and low-paid no-upward-mobility service jobs.

In other words I started to see piracy as an assault on the middle class, almost a tool to bust wages and disempower labor.

It also incentivizes locking everything up in the cloud. You can't pirate things if you never have them. Some of this may happen without piracy, but piracy makes it virtually impossible to run a business in any other way. It makes businesses that give you access to data or empower you to run your own software impossible.

P.S. The worst form of piracy is the kind that is perpetuated by gigantic corporations. IMHO a lot of the AI revolution is being powered by huge scale piracy. AI is cool but the people providing the training data need to be compensated, especially if their stuff is used to train models that are paywalled and never released. Don't misinterpret my defense of copyright and payment for intellectual labor as a blanket defense of the status quo. A big problem we have is that copyright law effectively no longer binds the largest players.

[MSFT_Edging]

I think the type of industry/market is a huge decider on what makes piracy moral. TV/Movies? hugely exploitative industry where you have nearly zero effect on the people who do a majority of the work. They've already been paid, the media most likely made the investment back(i know, exceptions), the rest is media landlording, owning the rights to a majority of the work's profit. Same thing with music. Musicians see almost nothing from their sales/streams. Most of the money made is to repay the labels costs, then once again, landlording by the label. Many musicians, especially indie musicians, will be pro-piracy if that means their fans can appreciate the work, since the label won't send them much anyway.

In the digital age, a majority of copyright is just digital landlord behavior. There's other things, like artist commissions, one-man dev shops(the software Transcribe! has a fair price, is fairly unique, stupid easy to crack, but why bother), and patreon feeds, which all actively fund the person doing the creative work and allows them to continue the work, without the feudal contingencies of traditional distribution.

That being said, taking someone's work and selling it for profit is basically the only scenario I think copyright law should apply to. No individual should ever be sent to prison or bankrupted for copying a file. The power imbalance is staggering for an overall anti-artist industry.

[Adverblessly]

> In other words I started to see piracy as an assault on the middle class, almost a tool to bust wages and disempower labor.

The middle class don't significantly own any intellectual property, it is owned by the huge corporations they may be working for.

It is also mostly the middle class that gets fleeced in schemes where they don't actually own the things they buy with their money due to copyright, from bought content disappearing to the ether, devices being illegal to repair or modify, devices spying on you etc.

This is why huge corporations are the ones bribing politicians^H^H lobbying for outrageous copyright laws and spreading pro-copyright propaganda^H ads and completely organic think-pieces in the media.

[1970-01-01]

>The thing that really changed my mind was realizing that the phrase "information wants to be free" just means "intellectual labor will be free."

That's one take. My alternative take is "humans will leak and speak of this knowledge (information) because it's interesting or important to them."

Your take implies free labor as a natural extension of this information liberty, but it does not need to be that way.

[skydhash]

Copyright is a solution for generating value for creative labor. But we stopped at this and access problems are still unresolved (not always caused by the copyright holder). The market is still being defined by North America and West Europe in a lot of cases (content are gatekept and geo locked). I don’t know how we can solve this (without a lot of good faith involved) but piracy is the current solution to being (culture/information)-deprived.

[thomastjeffery]

That vulnerability is entirely the result of a failed system. If we truly valued human life, we wouldn't gatekeep it behind income.

It's not just artists who deserve to make a living. Everyone living deserves a living.

[mistrial9]

basically agree here in California -- the economics from the point of view of an author or artist, are often ignored in the enthusiasm for information access..

[crtasm]

However while Stadia shut down, GOG is still going.

[ecshafer]

> The thing that really changed my mind was realizing that the phrase "information wants to be free" just means "intellectual labor will be free." In other words a world where there is no copyright and piracy is standard would be one in which no form of intellectual labor can be compensated.

This phrase has its roots in anarcho-communism that was pretty widely spread in hacker communities back in the day I think. Which means that its not really surprising that intellectual labor will be free, all labor should be free under such an ideology. Not debating the merits or demerits of anarchism or its flavors, but I think your view is a bit more on the side of reality.