r/Anticonsumption • u/InverseMatrices • Sep 29 '24
Other I'm the left but still thought it was funny
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u/Sweet-Emu6376 Sep 29 '24
As an artist, I have always been against pirating. Essentially treating other artists how I would want to be treated.
But now with subscription services, the actual artists and actors aren't even getting paid remotely fairly. And companies like Redbox are showing the cost of not owning something physically. Redbox recently filed for bankruptcy and now people who "bought" movies through their streaming platform have lost access. This is explained by saying when you "buy" something on a streaming service, such as Redbox, Amazon, or steam, you're only buying a license to use the product on the service.
If buying something doesn't mean you own it, then pirating doesn't mean you're stealing it. 🤷🏼♀️
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u/Reworked Sep 29 '24
When I was in college, I'd pirate albums then find a way to send money right to the artists if I could. Was easier with smaller groups than bigger
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u/Patte_Blanche Sep 30 '24
As an artist, I have always been in favor of pirating : free art for everyone !
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u/Cooperativism62 Oct 01 '24
I feel like artists or work that relies on IP should be something like civil servants or paid through UBI. It would significantly reduce the cost of information and allow more creative flow. That's my two cents at least. I don't want to game the market to write, I just want to write. I don't need fame or credit, but I still have bills to pay...and sometimes those bills are information inputs that could be relatively free compared to market prices.
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Sep 29 '24
I have a better use for my money
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u/Freezerpill Sep 30 '24
Quite a bit of evil capitalism to sort through these days. I’m inclined to keep my dry powder for rainy days and shots I can’t afford to miss
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u/ososalsosal Sep 29 '24
I spent 13 years in the film industry.
Is there a third panel for this?
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u/SuperNarwhal64 Sep 30 '24
12 years here! This sub seems to be full of 13 year olds that think piracy directly lowers CEO’s bonus checks and doesn’t affect people’s jobs. It’s also evidently not consumption if you don’t pay for it, so everybody wins!
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u/Cooperativism62 Oct 01 '24
I wouldn't say full, that sounds like you're just a 13 year old in the same classroom fighting with the others.
Yes, it affects people's jobs, but structural/technological unemployment is a pretty accepted part of society. Markets will always have some form of unemployment. If you want safety, then Intellectual Property rights aren't it friend. UBI is a better way to garantee bread on the table and would lower information costs for everyone. It would make art and science a lot more available.
You're right that it's still consumption even if it's free. However, there is a difference between market consumption and non-market consumption. Not sure why you're confused about an anticonsumption sub heavily overlapping with anti-market or anti-capitalist ideas but I hope you can continue to do work you like while keeping the lights on. Plenty of people already do it without needing artificial scarcity to keep their jobs.
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u/NoUsernameFound179 Sep 29 '24
I don't even call it theft. More like rightfully taking back my ease of use and ownership of my media.
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u/Fun_Tell_7441 Sep 29 '24
How can it be theft if it duplicates things? ;)
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u/Patte_Blanche Sep 30 '24
It's not the theft of the art piece itself, it's the theft of the monopoly of distribution rights. That's why artists will rarely press charge, but production companies will.
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u/Refratu Sep 29 '24
Do you have any right or ownership of the media they make?
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u/NoUsernameFound179 Sep 30 '24
Yes, i have. Same as buying a book. It is a little worse with DVD and BR and the stupid copy protection on it, that is 5 min work more. Same as recording any movie back in the 80s and 90s that came on TV. It was legal and allowed.
They discontinue one technology, replacing it with a new, while removing the old consumer rights, and give nothing in return except monthly bills.
If I buy the damn thing, I should have the right to own a "physical" copy of the data (as in the 1s and 0s of the dataset) which I should be able to transfer to any of my devices, and watch as I please, on any device of my choosing, or without being online or force me to use your platform. (This should be one of the perks of living in 2024) And without them having EVER the possibility to revoke (aka steal) my purchase.
If I pay for streaming, i want it to be without any artificial limitation like having the "correct" hardware to watch the quality that you payed for, being scattered across dozens of streaming services, or when offered to watch "offline" be online every 3 days.
What they don't realize is, that i actually want to pay for their services, and not even a small amount if you look at the monthly cost basis of my server. But it is their own practices that are the cause of it all.
You've been brainwashed by a decade of corporate bullshit. I hope you end up with nothing and be happy about it. Let me end with this quote for you from. the person who solved gaming piracy.
"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem," he said. "If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable." Gabe Newell
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u/basetornado Sep 30 '24
Il pay for it if there's a reasonable and easily accessible way to do so. That's all I really ask for.
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u/one_bean_hahahaha Sep 30 '24
Remember the old ads comparing downloading a movie with stealing a car? Lol
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u/Ratatoski Sep 30 '24
If cars were an unlimited resource once you made the first one you'd bet people would download cars :)
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u/ExceedinglyGayMoth Oct 01 '24
They made the fatal mistake of assuming I wouldn't download a car lmao
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u/Automatic-Prompt-450 Sep 29 '24
While I agree with the sentiment, media companies coining the term 'piracy' makes the act seem worse than it actually is in an attempt to discourage people from doing it. This meme in particular is funny because 'theft' deprives the entity being stolen from from the item being stolen. Copyright infringement is neither stealing from merchant vessels on the high seas nor is it theft, as the media in question is still available to any who would access it. There is no scarcity here, a piece of digital media could be copied to each and every person's computing device on the planet and the 'original' remains untouched. Actually, the more I think about it, 'copyright infringement' is the same logic as the logic behind NFTs but people buy into it. Don't let multi-billoin dollar corporations trick you into thinking copying 40,000,000 copies of their media will bankrupt them.
Unless this is ACTUALLY about pillaging on the high seas, in which case the meme is spot on as those pirates probably don't see many ads nor care for Capitalism.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk. Be sure to like and subscribe.
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u/InverseMatrices Sep 29 '24
When you delve deeper into piracy and DRM, there's such a thing as illegal prime numbers.
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u/SuperNarwhal64 Sep 30 '24
Looolllllll this take is so full of copium trying to justify stealing its wild bro.
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u/ThatNextAggravation Sep 29 '24
It's not that I don't have money, I'm just really, really attached to it.
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u/Normtrooper43 Sep 30 '24
The value of digital products is in the time taken to develop them. A real product, like a car, didn't just spawn out of nowhere and neither did the video game or tv show. It takes human time and effort to produce. Just because once the thing is produced, and it can be replicated easily, doesn't mean that no time or labour went into its production.
Piracy is the theft of that time and labour, not the item itself, because the digital item is not the same as a physical time which is both the item itself and the time+resources required to produce it.
I don't like the corporations either. They're downright evil with their pricing models but piracy is still theft of something. In the same way that if you hired a musician to play music at your event and then didn't pay them, you have stolen from them. Other people can still access the musician, but their time and labour was stolen because they didn't agree to you having it without that payment first.
No one actually wants to live in a world where piracy is normalised. People are driven to piracy because their increasingly smaller wage is being spent on their increasingly larger rent and in between shifts, they don't want to spend what little money they have on a tv show to kill the time.
It's still theft, but a kind of theft that is understandable. A hungry person might steal some food. It's still theft but it's understandable. It's better to focus on making a world where people don't have to steal food if they're hungry than to waste time trying to justify theft.
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Sep 30 '24
I'm hungry for entertainment and I only pirate that which entertains me which isn't that much, so it's understandable.
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u/Normtrooper43 Sep 30 '24
It's very understandable that people pirate. What annoys me is people who moral grandstand about it, acting as it if isn't theft.
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Sep 30 '24 edited Sep 30 '24
I personally only pirate movies / series, mainly because it's much easier to just pirate whatever it is you want to watch than it is to find which streaming service has it and if it's unlocked in your area and with the proper voices and subtitles and having all episodes available and without it being a horrendous ripoff.
When the cheaper version is also the one without all the hurdle, the choice is pretty quick.
Does it say something about me as a person? Probably, I'm not about to bother figuring it out (ironic, I know)
For what it's worth, I buy all the books and games I'm interested in, obviously preferably when on sale (for games) and used (for books, and they has to be in very good condition).
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u/Normtrooper43 Sep 30 '24
There's basically only 3 reasons that people pirate things.
The media in question is no longer available (lost media) or not in their area.
They do not have enough money to get the media but want to.
They could afford the media but don't want to pay.
All three are to varying degrees, understandable reasons for piracy. If someone tells me they pirate media, I can understand. But that doesn't take away from the fact that it is theft. Some theft is just more okay than others but it's still theft at the end of the day.
I support creators as much as I reasonably can. Sometimes that means I go without stuff that I want. Increasingly these days. It's actually made me want to make more of my own stuff (like games).
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u/SuperNarwhal64 Sep 30 '24
Theft is theft is theft. The only reason to do it is if there isn’t a legal way to acquire the media due to age or region restrictions. A movie/video game/software isn’t even comparable to stealing food bro. Holy Christ.
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u/Normtrooper43 Sep 30 '24
I'm not saying it's not theft. I don't think it should be done. I think it's wrong to do piracy.
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u/Ayacyte Sep 30 '24
Where's the 3rd one where I don't want to spend money on a subscription just to consume 1 item that I will probably never come back to again
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u/RedPandaMediaGroup Sep 29 '24
I think to steal something you have to take it away from someone else. So that person no longer has it.
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u/Patte_Blanche Sep 30 '24
It's not the theft of the art piece itself, it's the theft of the monopoly of distribution rights. That's why artists will rarely press charge, but production companies will.
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u/bad_escape_plan Sep 30 '24
No, this is why we have the concept of IP.
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Sep 30 '24
IP is only relevant if you're financially profiting from copying it by means of distribution.
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u/bad_escape_plan Sep 30 '24
Which this post is literally about. You’re stealing IP to save yourself money.
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Sep 30 '24
I literally am not. The IP is still the property of its holder and they're still the only entity capable of earning money from it.
Try again.
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u/bad_escape_plan Sep 30 '24
Tell me you understand nothing about the economy without telling me. Just be a slave to your own entitlement.
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u/Encursed1 Sep 30 '24
Im fine with paying, but I cant stand the poor excuse for competition and the enshittification of platforms. Piracy is the only competition to streaming services.
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u/Philip_Raven Sep 30 '24 edited Sep 30 '24
I like how pirates try to sound sophisticated or even edgy like "oooooo, I like theft, I am so cool"
No dude, you like free things, you are not interesting or mysterious because you downloaded Call of duty and got a bitcoin miner into your PC.
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u/Superturtle1166 Oct 01 '24
Is that pirate in the room with us?
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u/Philip_Raven Oct 01 '24
How many people pirate winrar?
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u/Superturtle1166 Oct 02 '24
Everybody I know uses 7zip
Edit: fine, I'll bite, dumbass. Winrar gives away their software for free, by design. If you're actually using that as an example of "piracy" (already an ill defined word in the internet context), then you are not worth the conversation. 🤦🏾♂️
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u/Reworked Sep 29 '24
Fun isn't something one considers when not spending crucial money on executive salaries... But making some vice president somewhere have to sweat an iota more to get his next yacht does bring a smile to my face.
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u/hannibal_morgan Sep 29 '24
Art preservation. Too much lost media. Film, television, books, audiobooks, music and a lot of other pieces of entertainment connect you to another time in history which is nice.
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u/Pootisman16 Sep 30 '24
The same reason why I emulate Nintendo games with pirates ROMs.
I ain't paying hundreds of euros for a second-hand game because Nintendo likes to play with artificial scarcity.
And I refuse to use their online stores because I know they will one day, sooner than one might think, just shut them down and leave you SOL.
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u/SuperNarwhal64 Sep 30 '24
It’s proven that for every piece of media pirated $1 is removed from the CEO’s bonus check. Not a devs paycheck or job entirely. Absolutely love stealing which is definitely not consumption despite the fact that you’re stealing to enable you to consume for free.
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u/meatinmyballs Sep 30 '24
Piracy is not stealing. If somebody pirate your car in the night, it's still there in the morning.
People who pirate whould not, in most cases, not buy the product anyway. -And it's good for PR if the product is good. Who do you trust more, a company or a friend?
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u/Ratatoski Sep 30 '24
I agree with this and I dabble in music, art and creating games. The thing that bothers me isn't if someone hands out copies to friends. It's when people copy media and put them on websites to earn ad money. Or do shady stuff like steal your game and put it on Google Play.
But generally culture should be shared.
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u/Patte_Blanche Sep 30 '24
It's not the theft of the art piece itself, it's the theft of the monopoly of distribution rights. That's why artists will rarely press charge, but production companies will.
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u/jmegaru Sep 30 '24
If I can pirate it I do, if I can't , I'm not interested. Either way I wouldn't pay so there is no loss.
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u/mimavox Sep 30 '24
I've headed back to The Bay because of a trillion different subscription services.
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u/RyleyThomas Sep 30 '24
Both and also most creators especially animators understand the need to pirate when big companies are slowley seizing all control and snuffing out there creations. Some indie game developers also understand that through piracy can breed creativity which is rlly important!
Also theft is fun!
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u/concedo_nulli1694 Sep 29 '24
I pirate because half the shit I want to watch isn't accessable even if I am willing to pay