Oh look, Sony revoking more licenses for video content that people “bought”.
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You know what say: if buying isn’t owning then pirating isn’t stealing.
Pirating isn’t stealing because it’s addition not subtraction. You’re creating more of a thing not taking a thing away from someone who had a thing. Actually what Sony is doing here is closer to stealing as people had a thing they purchased and now they don’t.
More like guidelines than actual rules
PaRleyyy!
Here’s my risky comment of the day.
I think piracy isn’t like stealing, but it’s still wrong in some interesting and nuanced ways. Just so you know, I’m in no position to judge people for pirating, because I’ve done my fair share of sailing the high seas. However, I would still like to discuss the ethical aspects of piracy and how it compares with stealing.
IMO, calling it stealing is completely wrong, but free-riding or trespassing could be more suitable words for this. Obviously, the movie industry would love to compare it with the most severe crime they can come up with, but they certainly have financial incentives behind that reasoning. I’m looking at it from a more neutral perspective.
Stealing has clear and direct harm associated with it, whereas the effects of piracy are more subtle and indirect. Free-riding a bus or sneaking into a circus (AKA trespassing) are somewhat similar, but there’s clear indirect harm. If you watch a football match from the outside of the fence, it’s probably still considered free-riding, but I would put that into a completely different category. IMO it’s also closer to piracy than the other examples.
Most pirates shouldn’t be counted as lost customers, so the argument about depriving the creator of their rightful income is only partially correct. If pirating wasn’t possible, but paying for the movie was, vast majority of these people would prefer to do something else like, go outside and play football with friends. To some extent, piracy still does reduce the demand for the pirated material, so there’s an indirect harm associated with it, and that’s what makes it unethical IMO. Still not wrong enough that I would stop doing it, especially considering what the alternatives are. Again, I have no moral high ground in this situation, and I’m willing to call my own actions unethical. You can call yours whatever you want.
Piracy isn’t stealing, the same way riding the subway without a ticket isn’t stealing.
Riding the subway without a ticket would be called, in many jurisdictions, theft of services
It’s nice that they made the distinction between regular theft and theft of services. The harm associated with them isn’t the same, so it would make sense to treat them differently. However, I still think that describing free-riding as a theft of any kind is a bit too harsh.
To some extent, piracy still does reduce the demand for the pirated material, so there’s an indirect harm associated with it, and that’s what makes it unethical
I get your point, especially when it concerns smaller/independent artists. But how would a “fair compensation” look like? Do top selling artists deserve the millions (or even billions) of dollars? Does someone even deserve hundreds of thousands of dollars? Does any artist deserve more money for doing something they love and where they can express themselves than a nurse working night shifts? Is it fair to keep earning money for some work that was done years ago? Does that mean a nurse should get a percentage of the income of every person’s life they helped save?
I think the only ethical thing to do is to decouple consumption and support. E.g. I might support some artist by buying their album (or going to their shows), because I think their voice is important, not because it’s an album I listen the most to. Or I might not pay artists at all and give money to political causes or other people that need support. Or I might support them in some other way etc.
This is a very tricky subject, because determining the value of entertainment is highly subjective. One song might be nothing more than background music to you, but it could be a life changing experience to someone else.
Performing music, theater, circus or something else is in the simpler end of the spectrum, but recordings changed everything. If I come up with a new song and perform it in a club, a one time compensation seems fair. If I record it, that’s when things get messy, and I don’t have a clean answer to those situations.
If I have to draw the line somewhere, I would say it’s fair that the artist gets compensated as long as they’re alive. It’s difficult to compare a recording to other types of transactions, because it’s just so different. Physical recordings are straightforward, but digital ones can get complicated due to how easy it is to copy them.
Nurses working night shifts is a good example of a situation where the compensation does not accurately reflect the importance of the work. How did we even end up in a situation like this? Maybe supply and demand just doesn’t always lead to a fair outcome, or maybe the government didn’t support the right parts of the economy. I really don’t know, but this situation needs to be fixed urgently.
Your idea of decoupling consumption and support is a really interesting one. It seems pretty good, but the more I think about it the more I feel like it might not be sustainable. Every time you watch your favorite movie, you’re getting some unquantifiable amount of entertainment out of it. As long as you feel like you’re getting something, shouldn’t you give something in return? If donations through Patreon were the only way for artists to get money, I don’t think we would have very many high quality movies, series, albums, paintings or sculptures.
How did we even end up in a situation like this?
Capitalism ;)
If donations through Patreon were the only way for artists to get money, I don’t think we would have very many high quality movies, series, albums, paintings or sculptures.
This sounds obvious, because if people don’t need to worry about money they can invest more time and effort into their art.
But a. this does not mean it’s fair. Not within the art scenes (because a lot of people are working hard but don’t have the luck for a breakthrough) and certainly not compared to other jobs.
And b. while a movie like Lord of the Rings or a series like the Sopranos do need a lot of money, many expensive movies are actually rather boring because they have to play it safe in order not to risk a fuckton of money. On the other hand, many great movies had a rather small budget. Avengers: Endgame could have paid for 100x Whiplash or Trainspotting, and I’d rather have more of those. And I think movies/series are the outlier - music is much cheaper to make.
But it’s hard to solve or even discuss all this in some lemmy comment ;-)
I feel like it might not be sustainable
The current system however is definitely not sustainable.
This is where our lazy lawmakers need to step in and protect consumers. Make it illegal to revoke these types of licenses over greedy, lazy, exploitative business mergers and acquisitions. If corporations want to fight that, then they shouldn’t be able to “sell” digital movies or games anymore: Any time you go to “purchase” digital content, it must plainly tell you that you’re renting said content for an undetermined amount of time.
Funny how so much recent talk has emerged yet again about how companies like Microsoft want to get rid of disc drives on their next Xbox… It’s almost like companies don’t actually want you to ever truly own anything. A rent economy is toxic and rotten, and it’s infuriating that it’s literally becoming our entire economy.
Companies change the contracts all the time and customers just agree to them.
Consumer protection would help, so maybe it’s time to start voting for the people who support it.
It’s entirely unreasonable to assume that the average person has the time or knowledge necessary to read, comprehend and agree to every terms of service agreement shoved in their face. Legislation should reflect this fact, and there should be something similar to game and movie ratings that give an easy to understand summary of the agreement.
Well said. I love everything about this agreement and the limits it inherently puts on “creative” terms in their agreements.
Imagine if there was a law for making the contracts easier to understand.
- We’ll spy on you and sell your data to the highest bidder.
- When something goes wrong, it’s your fault.
- You can’t blame us.
- No money back.
- When in doubt, we do what Darth Vader would do.
Sign here: _______
Come to think of it, slot machines do tell you quite clearly how bad the odds really are, but people still dump their money on them. Why can’t we have similar honesty and clarity when it comes to contracts.
I want a lot of things from the US Congress, but platform planks like better consumer projection/rights just sound like easy votes for any candidate. I can’t wrap my head around why nobody is at least lying that they’ll address this.
They’re probably getting paid specifically to not address this is the issue.
Meanwhile, the EU is crafting all sorts of consumer protection laws just like the member countries have been doing long before even joining the union.
Funny how so much recent talk has emerged yet again about how companies like Microsoft want to get rid of disc drives on their next Xbox… […]
While I will freely admit that the lack of a physical drive is a huge way to drive downloaded (and licensed, revokable) content controlled by the company, it’s worth noting that physical media is really not all that great a medium for transferring things like games or movies anymore. Blu-ray discs can hold, in ideal situations, around 50GB of data. A lot of games – especially AAA games, are well beyond that. I think Spider Man 2 came in at like 85GB? The internet says Hogwarts Legacy is ~75GB on XBox.
Network connectivity, and downloading content to our devices is almost certainly going to be the way a lot of the world works going forward. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be able to back our content up elsewhere, or offload it to some other device.
Your right in noting that the laws and regulations need to keep up and protect consumers’ right to the content they’ve purchased.
edit: Here, I’ll bold the important part.
I bought a 1TB micro SD card recently, it cost less than a new AAA game. Almost any individual AAA game would fit on a quarter of that.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray#BDXL
Even normal UHD BRDs can and do hold upwards of 100GB, as those can have 4 layers (~25GB each layer).
A lot of game size bloat is due to lazy optimization. Lords of the Fallen on PC–while it had questionable game performance for some folk–the game looked gorgeous and was quite a massive world, yet the download for it was around 40GB.
There are very few games I can think of that warrant being 100+GB. And even if they’re more than 100GB, what’s stopping them from just using 2 Blu-rays? Remember the PS1 days when games like FF7 had 4 discs? Or when WoW came out, it came with like 8 installation discs or some other absurd number? Blu-rays are more expensive, sure, but I can’t imagine games getting to be more than 2 discs long during the lifespan of Blu-ray as a storage medium anyway.
Except that games are broken at release and need day1 patch in order to work. Although you will ship BD, the day update servers are taken down, your physical copy won’t allow you to play the game either.
The only question I have is : Is torrenting game patchs / updates concidered piracy as well ? If it is, we are definitely doomed.
Yeah if I have to go all digital that’s the last console I get. At least with a PC I can get DRM free copies.
A rent economy is toxic and rotten,
Not always. I would gladly pay to rent something I need only every now and then instead to buy it.
I’ve been boycotting Sony since the CD rootkit debacle & haven’t regretted my decision yet.
I forgot about that whole thing. For those that need a reminder like me:
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/imMRzBzQm1U?si=JI8oEYGIN48E16Bu
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Damn i remember that shit.
I lost a very expensive (at the time) CD-RW to that shit.
How’d that happen?
He smashed it in a fit of rage
To shreds, you say?
Was its IDE port rent controlled?
To shreds you say?
Same here!
🏴☠️ sharing is caring.
Its barely the second month of the year and these companies are nose diving to the fucking bottom.
IIRC, though, that wasn’t Sony’s decision - WB yanked the licenses because they wanted those shows to only be on their streaming platform.
So it’s just irony that Sony is doing the same thing now.
Once they sold the copies, then the licenses for those copies were no longer Sony’s or WB’s to yank.
This shit is no different whatsoever from a store owner breaking into customers’ houses to steal back products they’d bought and paid for to settle a payment dispute with a supplier.
This shit is why I won’t buy anything that doesn’t have a physical copy.
I’m happy to rent stuff through a streaming app as long as it’s clear to everyone involved that’s what it is. But if I ever hit a buy button I would require access to it in perpetuity, the same way as a physical copy. But that’s not how that works, so if something is only available as digital media, and isn’t part of a rental platform, I’m not paying for it, end of.
(This mostly deals with games; I don’t spend money on much other media, but I refuse on principle and will pirate if it’s digital only. If it’s an indie studio I’ll donate directly when I can, but I’m not risking a financial loss like that. I can’t afford the risk.)
Who the fuck is Jerry?
CEO of Licensing
An autocorrect typo.
“The bar you had to clear was on the ground and y’all brought shovels.”
We’re lowering the bar all the way to hell
Enshitification is at phase 2
Sony won the case against Universal that allowed people to record TV shows with their VCR. I wonder how they’d feel if I pointed OBS at their streams.
Does OBS even work with all the DRM they’ve put on things? I thought that’s the whole point why it’s there, to keep people from screen capturing or restreaming videos
Probably not without some tinkering, but DRM can always be defeated.
It may not work directly, but there’s always a way to misdirect it, like a vm!
Android smart TV can use some foss screen capture apps while being undetected by PlayStation, of course there’s trouble with sound capture, but since tv is yours, it can be bypassed
If what they’re doing isn’t theft, then digital “piracy” isn’t theft either.
And with the unrelated rumours of Microsoft potentially leaving the console business and going multiplatform, it begs serious questions.
Do you really want Sony to have a monopoly on console gaming when they can’t even respect ownership rights for digital goods?
Tbf I left the console market a decade ago and haven’t really felt like going back. Computers do everything I need in the gaming sphere
Without extortionate extra fees either. I recently wanted to crossplay Overcooked on my PC with a couple friends on my PS4. “Buy PSPlus for only $100+ to play this game online!” Yeah, fuck off.
still think its crazy that online match making is a paid service on consoles.
remember when microsoft tried to do the same with PCs?
Emulate the consoles.
it begs serious questions.
Nope. It just raises them without beggaring them.
I fear we are rapidly approaching (or have already reached) the point where the definition of “begs the question” is going to be changed to include “raises the question,” much the same way “literally” now also means “not literally.”
I am not pleased by this development, but I was also not consulted.
What do you mean monopoly? If anything it’s a duopoly with Nintendo.
Do you think a software monopoly by Microsoft is better?
if you can take it from me, I can take it from you. piracy has become a moral imperative to stop valuable art being flushed down the memory hole.
They only took the digital copy though. Shitty move, but you still have a copy.
Pirating only takes a digital copy, they still have the physical ones.
I think many didn’t read the article. The only way to get a Funimation digital copy was by using a code that came with the physical copy.
Even if they’re taking away the digital copy, you still have the physical one.
if they pull this shit with music, i’m gonna have to look for self hosted music streaming apps.
Why stream music when SD cards are approaching TB?
i have a total of 512GB of storage in my Phone already, but my dad has repeatedly run into the storage limit of his 256GB phone. he’s not even that into music, and he stores his music compressed.
i can see all of the songs i listen to now taking up more than 300GB easily in lossles. plus i would be able to access the music from my phone as well as my PC without having to store duplicates, and having cross-platform playlists.
there’s a lot of benefit with streaming, and self-hosting is becoming more accessible by the day. if you have the bandwidth, i see no problem as long as your provider doesn’t fuck you over (which is on the horizon for spotify, we aren’t getting lossless and the prices are going up regardless)
I’m using jellyfin and it just works fine.
There are others more specialized in music. But I kind of like only having to use one service for all my media.
i already run jellyfin, i’ll check out how it works.
What makes you think they won’t? It’s a matter of time.
I use musicolet and just have a few GB loaded on my phone at any given time
May I suggest cloudplayer
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.doubleTwist.cloudPlayer
Not compatible with Android 14, and doesn’t seem to receive updates anymore (the last one was 2 years ago). So that looks like a terrible choice.
Sony should be fined for each unit they delete.
When my plex server does what Sony won’t/ can’t.
Not referring to Plex telling friends your porn habbits, I assume 😆
Not an issue if you don’t have friends.
Yah I don’t have porn on Plex. Not a big porn fan.
You can have different libraries and only share some of them with others.
This is why we prefer to buy physical media, getting a digital with it is nice, but physical is key.
It wasn’t even me was pushing for us to get physical media, it was my spouse. Of course my plex server the house probably helped. But after a few “forever” is only until next month, or shows completely disappearing altogether from any streaming, they started pushing for more physical media.
I think I’m alone with that on here but I don’t really like buying physical media. I get that that way you own it but it’s still just a storage medium with data on it, putting that data directly on my hard drive achieves basically the same thing. Since I can pirate basically anything anyway, I just think that even if a company takes away my access to something digital I bought, I can always just pirate it and I have it again. To me, physical discs are kind of a waste of money, space and resources because of that. I don’t have it anything against people who buy physical media tho, I do get the point of that.
Same, and I’ve already had to do this. Google started revoking things I “bought”. When they announced it I immediately went into Google Play, made a list of everything I “bought”, and pirated it onto my home media server.
It’s mine, and it’s on “physical media”, which I call an SD drive in a NAS.
I don’t need or want optical disks of things–they are subject to rot, more so than my NAS, and they are far far more fragile than the NAS+the backups. They take up space and collect dust. If I wanted cover art, I’d own the art and have it on my wall.
You can truly own things, and you don’t have to have plastic covers on a shelf to do that.
I actually like that thinking, haven’t thought of it that way. Should the day come when Sony decides to kill all digital copies of games people have collected over the years, who’s stopping them from just jailbreaking/rooting/cracking/CFW-ing their console to just download the games they want from dedicated communities who have dumped those games on the internet ages ago?
I did the same thing with my 3DS when the eShop was officially closed, and now I can’t imagine a 3DS without access to anything I could want on there.
I think I’m alone with that on here but I don’t really like buying physical media.
I suppose it depend on what you buy. Some things are worth to have the physical copy, some not.
I’m with you on most of this except I’m the physical media person, and also run the Plex server for my f&f ;)
I’m going to be setting up a self-host game streaming server soon too, because I won’t -buy- digital-only… but I will pirate it and throw some money at the indie devs when I can!
Digital ownership is a real issue. We need to ensure we own when we buy, or we should not buy
Well, copyright proponents succeeded in persuading the majority of people that buying something you can’t copy or share is still ownership, despite it being against human instincts.
Only instincts matter more, not less, than laws. Because instincts work first.
So in fact they persuaded us that it’s normal to own less, rent more, buy a cat in a bag, buy something without any guarantees, buy something with unclear obligations, because everybody around does that and it’s socially shameful otherwise.
Which is amusingly similar to what fraudsters do.
So the next stage is the amount of obvious fraud from those big copyright-reliant companies increasing. Good night, sweet prince.
Yes, I’d like one cat please. No, not that one…the dapper tabby gentleman in the back…yes, that’s the one. What’s that? No, no thank you, I don’t need a bag.
…on second thought, yeah, go ahead and give me the cat in a bag. What’s the damage?
Aye-aye, Captain! 🫡
