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Morality of Torrenting....

Post by Gone

A lot of people think that when you stream or torrent something its no big deal because your only taking money from some billion dollar actor/director or studio. But it reality its the little guy your hurting. Ive had two FYEs close in my local area in the last few years because people are getting all their music and movies online, those are the people who get hurt, the local employees or the small time shop owners.

Ironicly a guy I know who streams all the time says that he wouldnt buy gold because it supports account hacking :/

Anyway as far as this debate goes I think its ok to torrent if you already bought the dvds or plan on buying them. For example I dont have HBO, but I still stream True Blood and Game of Thrones, and then buy the actual dvd when it comes out.

Post by Skjeggtroll

But I am not even going to try and BS and say that its nothing other than what it is, and that is 21st century stealing. Ten years ago if I bought a CD, and lost it, I could not walk into Wal-Mart and shoplift another copy of the disk. So how is this any different?

Because the 'supply' of the product doesn't change. If Wal-mart has 100 copies of a disk and you steal one they only have 99 copies of it left. If you torrent the music on said disk wal-mart and everyone who carries that disk still has their 100 copies to sell, they didn't use up any bandwidth they didn't lose anything because nothing was stolen.

Torrenting, piracy whatever you call it isn't the digital version of stealing it's simply file sharing. Have you ever had a friend who had the Album and he let you borrow it so you could burn a copy? Or has a friend of yours ever beat a video game and let you have or borrow the game afterwards? Have you ever had a friend who'd let you borrow or even give you a book after they finished it? Torrents are the digital incarnation of that, except now you don't have that physical cd with you but rather just the raw data or information within it.
It's file sharing, nothing more nothing less

Edit: Since you brought up megaupload...

A quick trip to a torrent site shows the most shared file the last 24 hours had 15650 seeders and 13774 leechers. Now your saying that all those people are all friends of the uploader?
And welcome to 2012 where you have cheap streaming sites or other sites where you could actually download the content legally, making the money expense argument invalid.

Post by 557473

This post was from a user who has deleted their account.

Post by Squishalot

Post by fenomas

Hrmph. I can't say I've never torrented anything, but the level of self-entitlement in this thread just seems off. Look at the subtext behind the "not legally available" argument as with the lighter. As a defense for file sharing it's essentially saying, "Look, we can explore the morality here but me getting what I want is non-negotiable. Hence if there is no legal avenue to getting a lighter, then whatever remains must be defensible." Or to put it properly in terms of intellectual property, go to any manga forum and you can find scores of variations of: "I'd happily pay for that book if they'd just sell it where I live at a price I can afford." What you will not see is: "That book isn't available where I live, so I guess I'll read something else." I know we're a generation of narcissists, but whence came this notion that we as consumers have an automatic right to consume things, whether the creator offers it for sale or not?

Also, I love Neil Gaiman dearly but I don't think he has all the answers here, particularly for the area closest to my heart, which is games. I've talked to developers who made a game for Android or iOS, released it for a dollar or whatever, and then tracked installs and found that the large majority of their users got it from a warez site. Such devs get none of the upside Neil was talking about. (And while some say indie devs should be happy to have players, you can't finance your second game with buzz from your first.)

Basically for gaming I worry that it all pushes the market inexorably towards freemium. (Or as we used to call nearly the same thing in days of yore, nagware.) That's my main issue with torrenting - I don't like freemium games very much and I don't want most games to use that model. "Sorry, you can't Fus-Ro-Dah right now. Your dragon shout power will regenerate in three minutes. Click here to buy more now!" Yippee.

Post by ElhonnaDS

I personally have never torrented or illegally downloaded a game or a book. When I was about 12, before I understood that it was illegal, I got mp3's from some file sharing site. Now I use Spotify for music, and before that came out I used YouTube, which mostly has the original videos from the actual production companies. For movies, I've always just gone out and bought the DVD for what I wanted, or watched it on NetFlix or Hulu. Recently I'll admit to watching Season 2 of Walking Dead by torrent because I couldn't wait until it was released, but I plan on buying the box set when it comes out, as I did with the first season.

I'm not saying I'm perfect about it, but I always buy the media that I want (even if it is occasionally after the fact), or find legitimate avenues where it is free because of advertising. I don't think people are entitled to the intellectual property of other because those others have money, any more than I think they're entitled to go into their purse and take money. You may not be depriving them of physical assets, but you are depriving them of the value of their labor and returns on the investment they made in marketing on the assumption they'd make it back in sales. It doesn't matter if you wouldn't have bought it anyway- they put time and money into developing it for a certain price, and they're entitled to get that price if people want it. If it's too high, then don't buy it. But you can't have your cake and eat it too- say it's good enough that I want to own/watch/play it, but not so good that I want to pay the people who developed or wrote it. Well- you can, I guess, but it's not a morally defensible position.

Post by 204878

This post was from a user who has deleted their account.

Post by fenomas

I know we're a generation of narcissists, but whence came this notion that we as consumers have an automatic right to consume things, whether the creator offers it for sale or not?

From capitalism and I never said it's a right, I just said it will happen.
From capitalism cobblers, it's from ability. It's a thing people do because the capability exists, not because it's defensible. As I said, self-entitlement.

It's also completely their own fault.
Whose fault, the creators? In what way?

tracked installs

If you mean they had spyware in their applications, they got exactly what they deserved.
And if I didn't? Apps access servers for legitimate reasons. Anyway, are you seriously saying that circulating hacked copies of an indie game that costs one measly dollar from a universally-accessible store is morally more defensible than an artist adding code to his own app that does nothing but give him an idea of how many people have stolen it?

Post by gamerunknown

Piracy isn't directly responsible for stores shutting down. Online distribution is just more efficient, whether there's an exchange of money or not. That cuts out a lot of the standard costs associated with logistics and marketing and rechannels them (online advertising, social media, etc.). As it happens, I don't think equivalent effort is needed to promote a downloaded album as was needed to sell equivalent copies previously. Is this a bad thing? Is it a bad thing that it takes fewer people now to transport a package across the Atlantic, or vastly less time to produce a single garment? Only, in my view, for people benefiting from the inefficiency of the system. With a sensible economic system, we wouldn't need protectionism or provincialism.

Post by 204878

This post was from a user who has deleted their account.

Post by MyTie

I like to see piracy as a pre cursor to the way things are going to be. I think information is flowing freer and freer every day. In the future, information will pass of in unimaginable ways, at brilliant speeds, and massive amounts. Anything that can be digitized will move as freely as air. There is coming time when mass produced digitized programs will not be traded on the market at all. Piracy isn't a problem with the market, but the market is a problem with piracy. Call it what you will, but the market will not stand in the way of the free exchange of information, unless the government controls people's lives to the extent where they cannot use the internet freely, which is to say, stifles progress.

Post by fenomas

Point ---->
*You*

Oh snap!

Whoever made the decision to refuse to sell their product to a market that wants it.
Art begins with the creator and that's the creator's decision to make. Maybe there isn't enough of an audience in that market to justify selling there. Maybe he has logistical or ideological reasons. To take what has not been offered because you think it should have been is simply, again, self-entitlement.

Is file sharing more defensible than spying on your customers? I think so.
Sure, because you've framed things to let yourself think so. Instead of "spying on customers", why not be honest and say "inferring piracy levels from legitimate server traffic"?

Post by ElhonnaDS

So do you consider all security measures by companies to be a type of spying, then? I mean, if a stolen car uses a GPS or On-Star to show where it is, is the owner wrong for not trusting their neighbors not to steal their car? If a store puts up cameras to catch shoplifters, are the wrong to invade their customer's privacy? If an ISP shuts down your service for illegal downloading, are they more wrong for tracking your activity than you were for engaging in illegal activity?

Most of these defenses would be laughed at if it was in defense of any other law. If someone said, after stealing, that the store deserved it because they had such an effective advertising campaign that they made you want to own that item, even if you couldn't afford it, you'd sound really ridiculous. If you said that you only stole a car during the hours that the owner didn't need it, so even though you didn't have permission to use it, you weren't really depriving him of anything in the way in which you used it, you'd still be charged with theft.

I understand people who say "I know I shouldn't, but I'm really broke," or "I would buy it if I could, but it's not sold where I live." Not that it's right, but that they do it because they don't think it's all that big a deal. What I don't understand is people who somehow justify piracy as being a right, something they are entitles to or deserve just by the the fact that the material exists, and somehow feel morally superior when companies enact anti-piracy stuff. That train of logic is incomprehensible to me.

"It's not a big deal," I can understand someone thinking. "I have a right to anything you make" I can't.

Post by fenomas

I understand people who say "I know I shouldn't, but I'm really broke," or "I would buy it if I could, but it's not sold where I live." Not that it's right, but that they do it because they don't think it's all that big a deal. What I don't understand is people who somehow justify piracy as being a right, something they are entitles to or deserve just by the the fact that the material exists, and somehow feel morally superior when companies enact anti-piracy stuff. That train of logic is incomprehensible to me.

Hugely agree. Also I can certainly understand the observation that people will often torrent something if that's significantly more convenient than buying it, but it gets pretty hard to buy for things like mobile apps, where any app can be bought with one click, refunds, etc.

I should probably also temper myself a bit by pointing out, among other things I do take a morally neutral view of torrenting TV programs. When your business model relies on free distribution I figure you've opened that door, and anyway I don't buy the notion that viewers agree implicitly agree to any obligations (like not to upload to youtube) by watching a show.

But I'm basically very leery of sharing when it's an indie creator and they're trying to survive on a model that's hurt by sharing. I feel like much of the world's greatest art comes from folks where part two will not happen unless part one makes some sales, and not having a reasonably accessible way for that to happen makes us all the poorer. And the whole "well that creator is wrong for trying to profit" I just find bizarre.

Post by ElhonnaDS

Post by fenomas

@Fenomas-

The thing is, though, TV distribution is free to the end user, and paid for by sponsors. The money is made because the advertisers use the program to draw attention to the ad. If the program draws less viewers through legitimate channels, then It's devalued to the sponsors and still costs the creators money.

Certainly, but it's like banner ads in web pages - if your business model is to freely and widely distribute your content with ads, it strikes me as part of the bargain that lots of people won't look at the ads. Of course the model would be more lucrative if everyone did but that doesn't mean you can enforce it. (The polar opposite of this view is the old Jamie Kellner line about how if viewers go to the bathroom during the commercials it's theft... Equally bizarro.)

Post by ElhonnaDS

Right, but their shows have a value based on ratings- based on how many people are watching the show, and that a percentage of those are likely to see the ads. It's why the really cheap commercials are on in the middle of the night and the high ticket ones are on at prime time. It's because more popular shows can charge television stations more, which in turn can charge advertisers more based on how large an audience that show draws. Cut down the audience, and the television channel can't charge as much for the ad space, so they won't pay the creators as much.

The flaw in your analogy is that we're not talking about pulling banner ads off of one website and putting them on another. We're talking about taking created material off of a website with banner ads, and putting on a different website where none of the advertising money goes to the developers of that content.

Banner ads select what websites to advertise on (or at least pay a rate dictated by) site traffic. They do know how many people are seeing their ad, and if the website isn't pulling enough traffic they'll stop advertising, or at least pay less. If, for example, someone went and took all of the original content generated on Wowhead, and copy-pasted it to their own website, and copied the code they wrote for all of the tools here, then put naked people in the margins and let people curse as much as they want, wowhead would likely lose traffic as someone else would be making money off of what they wrote and created. As their monthly reports showed less traffic, advertisers would renegotiate rates or pull out. Which in turn hurts Wowhead's ability to finance new things on the website. Just because they let us view it free because it entices sponsors to pay them, doesn't mean that other people should feel free to copy and datamine the site and take traffic away, because they will be hurting the site and costing them money while they profit from creative material they didn't create or buy.

If someone chooses to watch the show through another channel that is paying for it, or they buy it, then the loss in add revenue from one source is made up for my the revenue from the alternate source. When they get it from someone who didn't pay the creators anything, it's just a loss.

Post by 557473

This post was from a user who has deleted their account.

Post by ElhonnaDS

If people ban torrenting, I will start a group to ban sharing. Good bye charities, friendships and the rest. Hello, cruel capitalist world.

There's a difference. When you share money with a charity, what you're doing is giving up your entitlement to that money and giving it to the charity. What entitlement are you giving up when you're torrenting?

Assuming I torrent stuff that I bought, I say I own those particular tracks, songs, games and I am free to do whatever I want. It is like having a car and picking up hitchhikers or carpooling. I did not make car, I bought it, but we all get benefit of using it.

No- it's like buying a car that someone else spent time and money designing, then copying the design (which is patented) and using it to make identical cars that you can sell cheaper because it didn't cost you anything to develop the design, test it for safety, get it registered or do any of the advertising that they did in order to make the car and create a market for it. And because your car is cheaper, you make the money off of it rather than them, and they lose out on the return of all those research and marketing costs, which in turn makes it less likely that they'll expend the same amount or time and resources to make the next car.

Piracy is not using something you bought. It's copying something you bought and making more of them without permission. If by torrenting a movie, you lost possession of it, and had to get it from somewhere else if you wanted to watch it again, then it would be you selling what you bought fairly, as a consumer. But to take it and copy it, you are creating new copies based on your original, which is NOT the same thing.

Post by fenomas

Elhonna, I know how TV and internet advertising work. I'm simply pointing out that with the TV advertising-supported model, you can rely on the fact that people who see the show's initial broadcast will see the ads, but that's more or less as far as the model goes. Twenty years ago you couldn't reasonably expect people to view the ads again when they watched their VHS copy, and you can't reasonably expect the equivalent now.

The analogy to banner ads is in the sense that wowhead can serve pages from their webserver with ads but once the stream of bits enters someone's browser it's up to them how it gets displayed. Obviously wowhead's model will work better if all such users keep the ads turned on but I don't think that amounts to saying it's immoral for them not to. (And stealing wowhead's content and code is another category of stuff entirely.)

Morality of Torrenting....

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