Can you enjoy art made by a terrible person?

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Re: Can you enjoy art made by a terrible person?

Postby ghijkmnop » Wed Jan 31, 2018 11:22 pm

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Re: Can you enjoy art made by a terrible person?

Postby 52xMax » Wed Jan 31, 2018 11:30 pm

I believe that if you want to be consistent, your stance on pirating should stay the same regardless of your admiration or dislike for the people behind an artwork.

I can see the merit of sellers' point, but at the same time I think if you're planning to consume products that come from both kinds of people and have limited resources, it is better to support the creators/studios that you sympathize the most and not patronize the ones you don't like but still grab their products anyway.

As always, there are other factors to consider, perhaps you'd want to help a creator financially even if you don't think very highly of them but you still want them to produce content, so you buy their stuff because you think they need the money more than the creator you like that's doing better financially. Perhaps their product is not as easy to get through illegal means, or there are some features you can only get through official means. Or maybe you're just a lazy fuck and/or have money to spare anyway, or a cheapskate who won't but either product, on "principle".

This is not a moral judgement on piracy, nor my whole opinion on the matter. Again, I'm just saying that regardless of your thoughts on this practice, it makes sense to remain consistent on it regardless of the recipients, at least to some extent. Your mileage may vary.
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Re: Can you enjoy art made by a terrible person?

Postby A Combustible Lemon » Thu Feb 01, 2018 8:33 am

Marcuse wrote:
Aquila89 wrote:
random_nerd wrote:Sorta related, but no matter how good a game it is I refuse to buy from EA ever again unless the company undergoes some massive changes beforehand. I won't not play the games from them I already own, but until the day either I die or their current policies die they will not see a penny from me.


That raises a different question; is it unethical to pirate a game from a company that you're boycotting?


Is it unethical to steal from a shop you wouldn't go into? Still theft, even if you don't like the people you're stealing from really hard. Also before anyone objects because no physical thing was stolen, violating someone else's property rights is still unethical even if it's not a physical property, unless intellectual property isn't a thing anyone cares about any more?


A much more accurate and less copyright-shilly analogy would be "Is it unethical to buy a counterfeit product if you thought the original manufacturer shouldn't be supported"

And in answer, almost every person who isn't part of the global rich would say No. (international) IP law is a western creation designed to break down domestic distribution in colonized markets. THIS is why China and India and other shitholes don't care about counterfeiting or piracy.

Piracy isn't analogous to theft in any way. Intellectual property isn't actually an analogy to regular property, it's an intentionally misleading misnomer. Copyright exists to protect the creator's ability to market his creation. Regular property law doesn't exist to protect lays' ability to sell a bag of chips. It has nothing to /do/ with markets. It's about owning what you have and, here's why the "loses a copy" is central to the idea of property, stopping people from taking it from you without the government's permission.

Meanwhile, counterfeiting laws exist pretty much exactly to protect ability to sell. They're there to prevent competition from flooding the market with lower priced versions of stuff that's intentionally sold at stupid insane markups.

In the game case, games that are costing literally cents for the companies to produce and distribute, globally, are being sold at 60 dollars or more, that's a several 100x markup.

And in pirate cases, the pirate is costing the game company negative sixty dollars and zero cents in distribution. They're just pumping cheaper, less marked up versions of the game that actually reflect the production price.

Yeah it's illegal. But I dare you to find as many people angry about counterfeiting as they are about theft. I'm pretty sure most people in the first world buy chinese things too.
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Re: Can you enjoy art made by a terrible person?

Postby JamishT » Thu Feb 01, 2018 8:47 am

ghijkmnop wrote:How many sports venues still play Rock and Roll Part 2 by the infamous Gary Glitter to thousands of screaming fans?


This is something I see as somewhat of a perk of not knowing a ton of musicians and actors. I would have never known who sang that song if you hadn't posted this, and I'll likely have forgotten by the next time I hear that song. Its a strange feeling to watch or listen to something and really enjoy it, and then find out that "everyone" knows that the artist or whatever is this totally awful person.
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Re: Can you enjoy art made by a terrible person?

Postby RatElemental » Thu Feb 01, 2018 1:36 pm

Aquila89 wrote:
random_nerd wrote:Sorta related, but no matter how good a game it is I refuse to buy from EA ever again unless the company undergoes some massive changes beforehand. I won't not play the games from them I already own, but until the day either I die or their current policies die they will not see a penny from me.


That raises a different question; is it unethical to pirate a game from a company that you're boycotting?

I know this has already brought up discussion on piracy and whatnot, but I don't pirate EA (or anyone else for that matter) anyway. I want nothing to do with them, hence the boycott, and I'd rather not give them a slim chance of fucking me over legally besides.

This may contradict what I said about still enjoying the products from them I already own, but I've realized I don't even do that anymore. As for the reasons behind my displeasure with them, that would be a thread of its own.
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Re: Can you enjoy art made by a terrible person?

Postby Marcuse » Thu Feb 01, 2018 2:18 pm

Meanwhile, counterfeiting laws exist pretty much exactly to protect ability to sell. They're there to prevent competition from flooding the market with lower priced versions of stuff that's intentionally sold at stupid insane markups.


I don't think that's true. Maybe in some cases, but in general I think the point is to stop someone unassociated with a brand name from using it to general interest from customers. Companies use names as a way to be identified, and it's not unreasonable to want to benefit from any goodwill from customers that you may have generated through good service, quality products or whatever. Counterfeiters use the goodwill generated by someone else to pass off items as made by someone else in order to get sales they otherwise wouldn't get. They're lying about the provenance of their product in order to deceive customers to gain financially, and I don't know why that would ever be ethical.

Piracy isn't analogous to theft in any way. Intellectual property isn't actually an analogy to regular property, it's an intentionally misleading misnomer. Copyright exists to protect the creator's ability to market his creation. Regular property law doesn't exist to protect lays' ability to sell a bag of chips. It has nothing to /do/ with markets. It's about owning what you have and, here's why the "loses a copy" is central to the idea of property, stopping people from taking it from you without the government's permission.


I mean, this is a very simple logical argument to parse out:

A) You work on a product, creating it by your labour.
B) You offer it for sale to others on terms of your choosing because you own it and have the right to it.
C) Some people subvert the terms of sale you set by acquiring it for free

I don't know how C is distinguishable from theft, where theft is the acquiring of property while subverting the terms of sale it was offered on. In both cases an individual is taking it upon themselves to appropriate an item created by the labour of another person while ignoring or subverting that person's right to offer the item for sale at terms they choose. If you want to argue that companies cannot set their own terms of sale or that it's ethical to ignore the rights of companies because they're not individuals, feel free, but I'm not sure how it's remotely possible to argue that piracy and theft aren't analogous activities.
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Re: Can you enjoy art made by a terrible person?

Postby A Combustible Lemon » Thu Feb 01, 2018 3:09 pm

C is distinguishable from theft because there is no way to not acquire it for free. It can be obtained /by accident/. The idea recreated entirely by a black-box process would, according to copyright law, still belong to the copyright holder. Which is insane and completely unethical. The analogy doesn't hold up at all at C, unless there was a way you could end up with someone else's property by accident without any harm done to them and it was still called Theft, and this was literally the only way property transfer could be carried out. (Analogies don't have to be perfect, but they have to have atleast one hypothetical situation where they apply)

The terms of sale in physical property have to do with actual possession. The terms of sale for intellectual property are a territorial license given to the IP owner by the government, BECAUSE there is no real way to determine or enforce possession for an idea.
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Re: Can you enjoy art made by a terrible person?

Postby ghijkmnop » Thu Feb 01, 2018 3:53 pm

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Re: Can you enjoy art made by a terrible person?

Postby cmsellers » Thu Feb 01, 2018 5:51 pm

52xMax wrote:I believe that if you want to be consistent, your stance on pirating should stay the same regardless of your admiration or dislike for the people behind an artwork.

I can see the merit of sellers' point, but at the same time I think if you're planning to consume products that come from both kinds of people and have limited resources, it is better to support the creators/studios that you sympathize the most and not patronize the ones you don't like but still grab their products anyway.

I agree, but I believe I am being consistent. If you believe that most people only pirate what they can't afford, which seems to be true (despite the existence of die-hard-pirates who won't pay for anything, pirates spend more money on media than the average person does), and that it's better for a producer to have people pirate content than not to consume it at all, then it would seem to follow that copyright infringment is not inherently immoral. But if you also believe that supporting people you abhor is immoral, then pirating their stuff still is immoral.

Marcuse wrote:I don't know how C is distinguishable from theft, where theft is the acquiring of property while subverting the terms of sale it was offered on. In both cases an individual is taking it upon themselves to appropriate an item created by the labour of another person while ignoring or subverting that person's right to offer the item for sale at terms they choose. If you want to argue that companies cannot set their own terms of sale or that it's ethical to ignore the rights of companies because they're not individuals, feel free, but I'm not sure how it's remotely possible to argue that piracy and theft aren't analogous activities.

The term "intellectual property" is another of my pet peeves. (If I end up listing these on the thread, by the way, I swear I'm not being passive-aggressive.) It's not property, it's a temporary monopoly. Typically, they're justified as an incentive to create, which I'm skeptical of. People invented stuff before patents, Shakespeare lived and died before the Statute of Anne. However they do encourage people to distribute. Several of Shakespeare's plays are lost because his company guarded them, the ones that survive had to be written down from live performances. (You could say they were pirated but this was before copyright was a legally-enforceable monopoly.) Likewise, guilds tended to keep new inventions secret prior to the invention of patents.

The difference is that patents and copyrights are non-exclusive goods. If you make a chair and someone steals it, you're out all the materials and labor you put into the chair and no longer have the chair. If you write an ebook and someone pirates it, you're out nothing. You still have your book, and you can sell it as many times as people are willing to pay for.

Now copyright groups claim that piracy is equivalent to a lost sale, and when you're talking about people who put on illicit first-run shows you'd be right. When people sell bootleg copies at a heavy discount you're sometimes right, but people tend to consume more of a good when it's cheaper. And when it comes to free goods, the evidence is that at worst the effects of copyright infringement for personal use is minor, and at best it's that it's a net positive.
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Re: Can you enjoy art made by a terrible person?

Postby Crimson847 » Thu Feb 01, 2018 6:16 pm

Marcuse wrote:I mean, this is a very simple logical argument to parse out:

A) You work on a product, creating it by your labour.
B) You offer it for sale to others on terms of your choosing because you own it and have the right to it.
C) Some people subvert the terms of sale you set by acquiring it for free

I don't know how C is distinguishable from theft, where theft is the acquiring of property while subverting the terms of sale it was offered on.


So if I read a book at the library instead of buying it, am I stealing that book? If a friend lends or gives me a copy for free, am I stealing the book from the publisher? If my roommate buys a microwave and I use it without paying the manufacturer, am I stealing the microwave? If I tell someone information that I read in a book, is that duplication and transmission of copyrighted information "theft"?

That is very literally what digital piracy typically is: someone who paid to acquire a good legally is sharing it with people who didn't pay a cent for it.

The problem, of course, is that simple media files can contain hundreds, thousands, or even millions of man-hours worth of creative, technical, and intellectual work, yet despite all that effort and complexity involved in their creation they can be duplicated and shared extremely efficiently by anyone with a computer. Internet filesharing allows us to share things not just with our family and close friends, but with half the goddamn planet. So it's cutting more deeply into the earning potential of the content creator than old, slow methods of sharing ever did, and thus creating a wholly new dilemma: how do people make a living without scarcity?
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Re: Can you enjoy art made by a terrible person?

Postby CarrieVS » Thu Feb 01, 2018 8:28 pm

Crimson847 wrote:If I read a book at the library instead of buying it, am I stealing that book? If a friend lends or gives me a copy for free, am I stealing the book from the publisher? If my roommate buys a microwave and I use it without paying the manufacturer, am I stealing the microwave? If I tell someone information that I read in a book, is that duplication and transmission of copyrighted information "theft"?


Once you buy a book, it is generally* yours to dispose of as you wish. You may lend it, you may give it away, you may sell it on. What you may not do, if it is under copyright, is duplicate it (barring certain exemptions related to Fair Use and so forth). The publisher has received their due for one copy, and no additional payment is owed no matter what is done with that copy.

As for telling someone what it says, I am not aware of if or how the law addresses that and differentiates it from making a copy. I should only be speculating. (If pressed to speculate, I should hazard a guess that the definition of a copy does not include information stored solely in a mind, but I stress that this is only a guess.)

(As far as I'm aware you may duplicate a microwave, unless any parts of it are under patent, although you may not sell the duplicate under the manufacturer's branding. It's possible I'm wrong on this.)


*One case in which this is not so is electronic media with DRM. This makes many people upset about DRM.
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Re: Can you enjoy art made by a terrible person?

Postby Lindvaettr » Thu Feb 01, 2018 8:53 pm

I'll be quoting Carrie here, but my arguments themselves aren't rebuttals to her. I'm just expanding on her replies.

CarrieVS wrote:Once you buy a book, it is generally* yours to dispose of as you wish. You may lend it, you may give it away, you may sell it on. What you may not do, if it is under copyright, is duplicate it (barring certain exemptions related to Fair Use and so forth).


This is precisely what separates lending/gifting things like books, cars, knives, or fully stocked bomb shelters to others from file sharing and similar things. If I lend you a book, I no longer have that book in my possession. I can't read it, I can't lend it to anyone else at the same time. That specific copy of the book is in your sole possession until it comes into the sole possession of someone else, in which case it's no longer in your possession.

File sharing doesn't work that way. If I lend you the files to install it yourself, I still have those files. I can make as many copies as I want at no cost to myself. Our copyright laws were created at a time long before digital distribution or anything remotely similar were so far removed from reality that no one could possibly have factored them in. However, just because the laws are outdated doesn't mean the goals of the laws are invalid.

A person is now capable of creating an essentially infinite resource in the form of digital products. As a software developer, if I write a program, that program can be copied infinitely many times for a fraction or a fraction of a cent per copy. The argument that there are no further resource costs to create copies and therefore copying should not be restricted, however, it extremely flawed. Physical resources may not be scarce, but the other resources still are. I don't have unlimited time, for example.

If I spend 1000 hours developing a program, that's 1000 hours I used that could have been used for something else. If I bill myself at a rate of, say, $100/hour, that's $100,000 of time I've spent. If I sell the software for $50, I need to sell 2000 copies in order to break even purely to recoup the time spent.

That doesn't take into account other resources. I needed a computer to develop it, which cost $1000. Even if I use that for other things, at least a percentage of the computer's operating time was spent developing. I also used electricity, which I had to pay for. If I want to sell the product, I likely need to pay for advertising of some kind. I need to pay a graphic designer to make a logo (because I don't want to make one myself that looks like crap). My costs are absolutely not zero, and extremely far from being minimal. They're actually quite high.

Simply because someone can easily copy my files without a cost to them or to myself, that doesn't mean the software is free. If 10% of people using my software have acquired it illegally, and otherwise would have purchased it, that means I need to sell an additional 200 copies to break even. So while digital distribution is theoretically not extremely impactful, it still absolutely and undeniably affects my bottom line, and therefore my well being.

Digital piracy may not be theft in the traditional sense, but it is theft in a more abstract sense. It's exploiting my work for your benefit, while refusing to provide a basic trade of materials or services to allow me to recoup the losses I incurred while creating the software. If an employer doesn't pay you for all the hours you worked, it's wage theft. Software piracy is basically the same concept.

CarrieVS wrote:As for telling someone what it says, I am not aware of if or how the law addresses that and differentiates it from making a copy. I should only be speculating. (If pressed to speculate, I should hazard a guess that the definition of a copy does not include information stored solely in a mind, but I stress that this is only a guess.)


Generally speaking, copyright only applies when you're duplicating the same result. For example, I can't legally copy a music video's files, replace the visual portion with a black screen, leave the song, and post it on YouTube, because it still allows people to hear the song for which the video was created, without recompensing the creator. People who listen get an experience close enough to the original intended experience for them to have no reason to pay for the original experience. If I just tell someone about the song, they don't get anything resembling the original creation, so they still have an incentive to pay for the original. This is why Cliff Notes can exist, but why they only include a tiny amount of text from the book in question.
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Re: Can you enjoy art made by a terrible person?

Postby Marcuse » Thu Feb 01, 2018 9:17 pm

While I agree with most everything Carrie and Lind have said, I wanted to quote the part I think says what I was trying to say better than I could:

Lindvaettr wrote:Digital piracy may not be theft in the traditional sense, but it is theft in a more abstract sense. It's exploiting my work for your benefit, while refusing to provide a basic trade of materials or services to allow me to recoup the losses I incurred while creating the software. If an employer doesn't pay you for all the hours you worked, it's wage theft. Software piracy is basically the same concept.


ETA: To respond to one other thing.

Lemon wrote:C is distinguishable from theft because there is no way to not acquire it for free. It can be obtained /by accident/.


Whut. I mean, I know that it's every other day that I trip over my desk and my swingin' cod bashes the keyboard in such a way as to torrent some music I like. Such a shame, but can't be helped. That's an absurd example, but I really don't see how it's possible to pirate something by accident, and if it was, then the only way I think it could be conceived of is by misunderstanding the nature of what I'm describing as theft.

So if I read a book at the library instead of buying it, am I stealing that book? If a friend lends or gives me a copy for free, am I stealing the book from the publisher? If my roommate buys a microwave and I use it without paying the manufacturer, am I stealing the microwave? If I tell someone information that I read in a book, is that duplication and transmission of copyrighted information "theft"?


Carrie responded to these already, and perfectly sufficiently. However I do understand where you're going with the question about scarcity, and it cuts to the heart of value. Infinite copies of a thing render them valueless, so it's hard to see how it would be economically viable without an arbitrary system to create and enforce scarcity in order to make those kind of activities appropriately incentivised in a market economy. But under that system the creation and dissemination of infinite copies of content is akin to theft because it breaches that system of enforced scarcity. If we want to overcome that, we'd need to radically overhaul our economic system and I'm not sure the world is ready for that right now.
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Re: Can you enjoy art made by a terrible person?

Postby A Combustible Lemon » Thu Feb 01, 2018 9:55 pm

Oh, do you find it absolutely impossible that you can infringe on copyrights, trademarks, or patents by accident? I'd better tell Elisha Gray he's a hack then.

The point was that the copyright holder can absolutely not be involved in the chain of production of the copyright infringing content in any way and the government will STILL give him the win. Because it's not his property. It's a license granted by the government that governments can and should remove when it's unnecessary.

Loggers and Rangers don't own the woods. The copyright holder doesn't own the intellectual content.

And as for the cost of labour. I absolutely think establishing an industry on the enforceability of copyright law in the digital age is absurd. This is it, this is post-scarcity, this is where we collectivize data and code.

And unlike collectivizing the products of physical labour, in the software industry and digital goods, people don't have a friggin leg to stand on about how stability will be affected by the loss of proprietary products. Software was built on military patents, cryptography institutions, university projects and hobby programmers. If copyright was abolished overnight, not one thing I'm working on at this point in time will be affected. None of my lGPL stuff, none of my GPL stuff, none of my MIT stuff, none of my BSD stuff. The microcontroller drivers, which aren't sold but tied directly to the hardware so they'll survive (and opposition research that can recreate them will be expensive as hell), are the first major thing that actually needs copyright to survive. AND THEY HAVE GENERICIZED VERSIONS THAT MIGHT STILL WORK.

And this is the absolute worst case scenario where no proprietary software whatsoever will survive the purge. This is completely ignoring the standards organisation work that Windows and OSX use (POSIX, HTTP, GNU, UNIX), the Xerox prototypes they did not pay a cent in R&D for, and so many other things where proprietary software "stole" their code.


Also, dropping all the ideological "Stop whining, copyright is historically unnecessary and enforced unethically in the digital age, losing it won't be the end of the world" stuff. The idea that service becomes worthless if you can't sell stuff is stupid. I'm not being paid a salary that directly translates to sales. Most people aren't. (All the profits go to the top) Software engineering is very specialized work that a shitton of people, even most software engineers, can't do well. If the internet will survive (and it sure did for the ten or so years before itunes and steam), there'll be software work to do and software people to do it.

There are now hundreds of AAA games that have found a way to make their games actually closer to their worth too, with their closed Server systems and Multiplayer content. Hey look, a way to make money without copyright concerns. Weird.
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Re: Can you enjoy art made by a terrible person?

Postby Learned Nand » Fri Feb 02, 2018 11:06 pm

A Combustible Lemon wrote:C is distinguishable from theft because there is no way to not acquire it for free. It can be obtained /by accident/.

Conversion (basically, theft as a tort) can absolutely be done by accident. In that circumstance, the remedy is usually to return the converted goods rather than to pay damages. But even if you had a good faith, objectively reasonable belief that you owned the converted property, or even if you didn't realize you'd taken it, it's still conversion.
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