Is Pirating Wrong?

This is my first post is the D&D forum, so if this topic does not belong here, then Close/Delete it at any time.

Alright, nearly everyone knows what pirating is, so I think it's time to get down to the point. I believe that all pirating is wrong. Whether it is games, music, TV, or so on, I feel that it is a form of stealing.

This is sort of the point of veiw I have. Look at the answer: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20081219123831AAkiPnU

I'd say most of the time it's wrong. However, there are certain cases to which I'd agree with illegal downloading:

- If a film or TV series has been released overseas but will not be released at the same time or within a few weeks over where I live, then I'll download it, because there's no good reason for those idiots at the networking companies to make our country wait. It's just not fair. (This usually happens to European countries because American companies like to release everything in the States well before anywhere else, for some reason).

- A band's B-side songs, if they're not going to bother releasing a collection of them. I'm not searching day and night for single CDs online, which will probably be ridiculously overpriced.

I'm sure there's a third. I'll have to edit it in later.

At the end of the day, piracy is stealing, and I hate it when people just download everything for free because they're too greedy and too lazy to go and buy it in a shop. However, as I mentioned, I think there are perfectly acceptable circumstances in which piracy is most agreeable.

I agree with Volke.
Mostly piracy is just a digital four-fingered-discount, but occasionally alright, like the time I wanted to get a song, but it was only available in an album with songs I already had.
Naturally I didn't want to have to pay extra for stuff I already have, so I tried to get it somewhere free.
I failed :[

Piracy can take a lot of money off the original producers though

I believe that "pirating is simply stealing and therefore wrong.

Volke said:

I'd say most of the time it's wrong. However, there are certain cases to which I'd agree with illegal downloading:

- If a film or TV series has been released overseas but will not be released at the same time or within a few weeks over where I live, then I'll download it, because there's no good reason for those idiots at the networking companies to make our country wait. It's just not fair. (This usually happens to European countries because American companies like to release everything in the States well before anywhere else, for some reason).

- A band's B-side songs, if they're not going to bother releasing a collection of them. I'm not searching day and night for single CDs online, which will probably be ridiculously overpriced.

I'm sure there's a third. I'll have to edit it in later.

At the end of the day, piracy is stealing, and I hate it when people just download everything for free because they're too greedy and too lazy to go and buy it in a shop. However, as I mentioned, I think there are perfectly acceptable circumstances in which piracy is most agreeable.

I believe that all pirating is wrong. That is not to say that I haven't done it, but one can have their morals and fail to live up to them.

I hope you can see, Volke, that just because something isn't available for you to easily obtain, doesn't mean that it's right to download it. You can import copies and such.

As for B-Sides, there are usually plenty of ways to obtain legal copies, such as singles and imports. Now, if the artist releases something or gives their blessing to downloads, that's another matter.

You see, I like to Download homebrew apps for my Nintendo DS, but if someone claims rights to a game or traidmark, I buy it before downloading. That's with games though. When it comes to music with me, if I like a song from a game, TV show or something else, I check Itunes. If the particular song that I like is not available to buy, then I get it off of Youtube. I say that for most things, Pirating is illeagal. If you want something in England, wait for it to be released in America. If it is not going to be released, than import it. Overall, pirating is stealing.

I used to be a member of GBATemp.net. It was FULL of pirates. What did they have to say? "Piating is not stealing but only copying." Does anyone agree? (I would give you a link to the site, but I got banned. )

It is copying. And it's illegal and immoral. When is copying ever not either illegal or immoral?

It's wrong, but I do a lot of other stuff people would consider wrong. This ain't so bad.

YoSoyJu said:

It is copying. And it's illegal and immoral. When is copying ever not either illegal or immoral?

I'm not trying to get off topic but didn't you say on the other thread that we were debating on that everyone determines his or her own morals?

I do agree with you but I think that you are somewhat contradicting yourself.

Patriot X said:

I totally agree.

Just a quick thing but posts that just say 'I agree' aren't allowed in this forum. Its just to ensure that we don't get a load of other people just popping in and agreeing without every backing anything up or providing something to the debate.

My bad.

Patriot X said:

YoSoyJu said:

It is copying. And it's illegal and immoral. When is copying ever not either illegal or immoral?

I'm not trying to get off topic but didn't you say on the other thread that we were debating on that everyone determines his or her own morals?

I do agree with you but I think that you are somewhat contradicting yourself.

I don't think you get the fact that there are no absolute morals. I am declaring that I believe these things to be immoral and asking if someone can produce an example based on their own morals.

Brandon 2006 said:

It's wrong, but I do a lot of other stuff people would consider wrong. This ain't so bad.

It's stealing. Pure and simple. You are taking something without paying for it. How is that not "so bad."

Patriot X said:

My bad.

Don't worry about it, as I said its just to ensure that people new to the forum know they need to post a little more and contribute more like yourself and other regulars here do.

Technically its also 3 words or more a post but you wouldn't have posted that if it wasn't for me anyway, so I'll let that one slide

To the topic at hand, I'm with most people here in that I believe it is wrong. At the end of the day someone has put a lot of work into making whatever it is (well sometimes I do wonder) and its really no different from stealing some bread from a baker when you look at it. That said though as Volke and others have mentioned if something is out but takes ages from it to go to other countries they seem to almost be inviting people to copy them, I know its one of the reasons I'd do it.

Dear me. This isn't an argument I'm particularly familiar with, but I suppose I can take a stab at providing some decent opposition. Although there are some rather obvious holes in all the arguments I can think of... I may simply concede the argument at some point if replies start building up and I can't keep up with them.

So, file-sharing. A lot of people here have taken the rather simplistic "you've taken something without paying" approach to arguing that it's wrong. However... consider the nature of file-sharing. It's not actually physically taking something from anyone. It can be likened to lending a CD to a friend and allowing them to rip the files onto their computer, but simply on a far grander scale. If I illegally download an album, I haven't gone into a store and stolen the physical CD from them, which means that no-one is made worse off purely by me downloading the music.

Record labels and various musicians have hit out at file-sharing, saying that it hurts profits. However, they have done so in the past at various things which are now accepted by the majority of society, such as home recording. All you have to do is wait for the song you want to come onto a free radio station, record it off there, and voil�! Free music. Is this really so different to file-sharing? It's probably done on a large scale as well due to the wide availability of radio and the ease of recording things from the radio. Similar examples exist on the Internet as well - one only has to Google "Youtube to MP3 converter" and one has a huge list of sites able to rip the audio from any YouTube video.

Finally, promotion. Little-known artists often find it difficult to make their music heard because large music stores simple don't stock it, and people won't hear it from their friends in all likelihood. But someone who takes a casual interest in a band and then decides to sample some of their music can download some or all of an album, listen through, and potentially end up buying the album or other albums by the same artist, whereas without filesharing they might simply have forgotten about them and never contributed to the band's profits.

...Yeah, not great arguments. But it was a little one-sided in here.

Brandon 2006 said:

It's wrong, but I do a lot of other stuff people would consider wrong. This ain't so bad.

This, I download illegally all the time. Uh, I mean I've NEVER done it before. It's wrong, but oh well people do it all the time.

Catharsis said:

Dear me. This isn't an argument I'm particularly familiar with, but I suppose I can take a stab at providing some decent opposition. Although there are some rather obvious holes in all the arguments I can think of... I may simply concede the argument at some point if replies start building up and I can't keep up with them.

So, file-sharing. A lot of people here have taken the rather simplistic "you've taken something without paying" approach to arguing that it's wrong. However... consider the nature of file-sharing. It's not actually physically taking something from anyone. It can be likened to lending a CD to a friend and allowing them to rip the files onto their computer, but simply on a far grander scale. If I illegally download an album, I haven't gone into a store and stolen the physical CD from them, which means that no-one is made worse off purely by me downloading the music.

Record labels and various musicians have hit out at file-sharing, saying that it hurts profits. However, they have done so in the past at various things which are now accepted by the majority of society, such as home recording. All you have to do is wait for the song you want to come onto a free radio station, record it off there, and voil�! Free music. Is this really so different to file-sharing? It's probably done on a large scale as well due to the wide availability of radio and the ease of recording things from the radio. Similar examples exist on the Internet as well - one only has to Google "Youtube to MP3 converter" and one has a huge list of sites able to rip the audio from any YouTube video.

Finally, promotion. Little-known artists often find it difficult to make their music heard because large music stores simple don't stock it, and people won't hear it from their friends in all likelihood. But someone who takes a casual interest in a band and then decides to sample some of their music can download some or all of an album, listen through, and potentially end up buying the album or other albums by the same artist, whereas without filesharing they might simply have forgotten about them and never contributed to the band's profits.

...Yeah, not great arguments. But it was a little one-sided in here.

I appreciate your attempt to play Devil's Advocate for this discussion, but I'm afraid it's one sided for a reason.

First paragraph...if you lend a CD to a friend to rip onto their computer, they have just stolen that music and you have facilitated that act. Just because something isn't physical, doesn't mean it doesn't have value. If I pay you to clean my house, I'm not paying for a physical item, I'm paying for a service. By you downloading something, you haven't affected an inventory, but you obtained something that is supposed to be paid for for free.

Next paragraph...If you record something off the radio, it has been paid for. The station must pay each time they play the song. If you rip something from YouTube, you are directly impacting monetary gains, as the companies that legitimately put up those songs are paid per hit the video receives.

Last paragraph...That's all well and good if they give the stuff away, but this is the strongest argument on the surface for your side, but the weakest overall since it's the smaller bands that need the money the most. Also, like you said, most of them will have music on YouTube or Pandora or Last.FM or Slacker or any of the hundreds of sites where they are paid for a listen where you can sample their music. Sure, you might not get the whole album, but if you like their single, you can listen to 30 seconds of the rest of their songs on iTunes or Amazon.

Overall, yes I have engaged in piracy and might again in the future, but that doesn't change the fact that it is directly taking money out of the pockets of the creators you are trying to support.

I always download my songs of itunes etc so i pay for them.My only exception is games for my Nitendo DS and i only do it maybe 1 or 2 times every few months.Mainly cause games here are ridicously overpriced.Your games are what 30 to 40 pounds.Over here its mainly $80 for DS and PSP and $100-110 for 360 etc.Still thats only about 50 pounds.

YoSoyJu said:

If you record something off the radio, it has been paid for. The station must pay each time they play the song. If you rip something from YouTube, you are directly impacting monetary gains, as the companies that legitimately put up those songs are paid per hit the video receives.

Well, now, hang on there a second.
You're saying it's alright to download/record a song off the radio, as it has already been paid for, yes?
Well, by that reasoning, pirating is perfectly legal. How would the original uploader of the song have got hold of it in the first place? Either he would have had to buy it (making all other downloads of the song legal, as somebody has paid for it), or got it off the radio (already discussed above).
Even if he got it off youtube, then the uploader would have had to get it somewhere.

As for creators being paid for each view on Youtube.......c'mon.
Just think about how many Videos of songs there are in the whole site. And there was that Music Video that got about 200,000,000 views (forget which one). As the viewers don't have to pay anything, the thought that Youtube would fork out a couple of grand just because some punk wanted more subscribers is simply ridicoulus.

CRAZY CHEATS said:

YoSoyJu said:

If you record something off the radio, it has been paid for. The station must pay each time they play the song. If you rip something from YouTube, you are directly impacting monetary gains, as the companies that legitimately put up those songs are paid per hit the video receives.

Well, now, hang on there a second.
You're saying it's alright to download/record a song off the radio, as it has already been paid for, yes?
Well, by that reasoning, pirating is perfectly legal. How would the original uploader of the song have got hold of it in the first place? Either he would have had to buy it (making all other downloads of the song legal, as somebody has paid for it), or got it off the radio (already discussed above).
Even if he got it off youtube, then the uploader would have had to get it somewhere.

As for creators being paid for each view on Youtube.......c'mon.
Just think about how many Videos of songs there are in the whole site. And there was that Music Video that got about 200,000,000 views (forget which one). As the viewers don't have to pay anything, the thought that Youtube would fork out a couple of grand just because some punk wanted more subscribers is simply ridicoulus.

Your argument doesn't scale. The radio station pays to distribute that tune over the radio. When you pay for a song on iTunes, you aren't paying for a license to distribute, you are paying for a private license.

Do you not know how YouTube works? Partners put ads in the vids. YouTube is paid for the advertising and share the revenue with the creators.

But what about the songs without the ads? Would ripping those be stealing if there is no revenue?