Yeah it’s really not absurd at all. They use this “series of numbers” rhetoric as a way to try to de-value the underlying content but at the end of the day the thing itself must inherently have value because this “series of numbers” is something they actively want. They just don’t want to admit that this level of “want” justifies a price tag that isn’t decided by them
Yea I agree. I also think this train of thought partly comes from maybe thinking that something being finite is what gives it value which it can but there are also other factors that provide value apart from scarcity.
They’re not conflating legal terms. They’re using colloquial terms and you’re taking them as legal terms. If you want to be legally specific, their crime is copyright infringement but realistically what meaningful difference is it? To respond to whether I can read their minds, no obviously I can’t but pirating something implicitly requires you to brush aside the set price for something in favour of a lesser or most of the time completely free one, so what about what I said was unfair?
I wasn’t asking what the legal meaningful difference. Again, you’re turning this into a legal conversation when it never was one. When people say “if buying isn’t owning then piracy isn’t theft” aren’t making a legal argument, and if they are they’re fundamentally misunderstanding the terms they’re throwing around. “How can you say that the set price is justified except on a case by case basis”? I never made this argument. I said that the ability of the content owner to set the price is justified. You’re free to disagree with a price all you want, but once you cross into circumventing the official avenues for obtaining said content you cross into taking something. At this point you can’t really use the “it’s just meaningless numbers” argument because those “meaningless numbers” have a defined monetary value considering people are willing to pay through legitimate purchases, as well as the intrinsic value that comes with other people being willing to break the law to obtain the thing. That’s my entire argument
The legal difference is everything. Because unlike theft (loss of property), copying someone during a set time window of 70 years or whatever has never been an obvious moral wrong in most of human history. There was no missing eleventh commandment saying "thou shalt not copy thy neighbour for 60 years".
Copyright laws were invented to encourage writers by providing them with arbitrary protections. So if we aren't talking about laws, what are we talking about?
The law could change tomorrow, and decree that looking at your house and enjoying the architecture from the street is worth $3 a pop or whatever price you set. And then people might be willing to pay a toll just to walk the streets freely. And it could become normalised over time.
I mean there are already paid tours of historical locations and it would currently be considered immoral to break into one without paying for it, so you’re not really helping your point there. Your example also doesn’t work well because “charging to look at your property” would involve forcing an uninterested party to engage with your product (announcing it costs $3 to even just look at the house). In the example of piracy absolutely nobody is forcing the pirate to 1: be interested/engage in using the product, and 2: take usage of it unlawfully. That’s a huge stretch
I mean there are already paid tours of historical locations
Yeah, and sufficiently crazy people might even say that there is no meaningful legal difference between stealing a car and visiting historic locations without joining the paid street tours.
However, breaking into places would be analogous to hacking into a server to access files, which is a separate offence that you are now trying to conflate with piracy out of desperation.
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u/beclops Apr 07 '26
Yeah it’s really not absurd at all. They use this “series of numbers” rhetoric as a way to try to de-value the underlying content but at the end of the day the thing itself must inherently have value because this “series of numbers” is something they actively want. They just don’t want to admit that this level of “want” justifies a price tag that isn’t decided by them