Hi guys, first of all, I fully support Piracy. But Im writing a piece on my blog about what I might considere as “Ethical Piracy” and I would like to hear your concepts of it.
Basically my line is if I have the capacity of paying for something and is more convinient that pirating, ill pay. It happens to me a lot when I wanna watch a movie with my boyfriend. I like original audio, but he likes dub, so instead of scrapping through the web looking for a dub, I just select the language on the streaming platform. That is convinient to me.
In what situations do you think is not OK to pirate something? And where is 100 justified and everybody should sail the seas instead?
I would like to hear you.
This is assuming - like digital media - some one took the time to spend his own free time to make copies of a physical medium.
There is no way of knowing whether the person has copyright or stole the first copy.
Or compare school books: the whole class buys one copy together, makes copies for every person to share costs. Likewise, a whole family can chip in to buy a car - you wouldn’t force them to buy a car each.
But again, if he hands it to you, he deprived himself of that copy. A physical thing has changed hands. That does not happen with online piracy. It’s very different.
Whether someone spends their personal resources to copy a medium digitally or physically doesn’t really matter to the copyright holder or author. They won’t get paid either way
You are kind of changing the parameters here. We are not talking about a copy he physically made. We are talking about how in most cases someone handing you a physical book will have bought it. Maybe they stole it, but at that point the entire starting point is a crime and I think we all agree stealing a book from a bookstore or library is not ok, so we should throw that out because it ruins the entire exercise.
So assuming they bought the book, if they hand it to you, they have now deprived themselves of the thing they bought. They bought it and gave it to you. It’s just a gift at that point.
That is why it is not all that comparable to online piracy. That distinction is incredibly important.
The two examples in your later paragraph are wholly different cases: the second is a completely different use-case and the first one is actually less morally unambiguous than you think.