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.
If that is really your top order concern, then when you pirate you should figure out what their cut would be and send them the money directly. But it’s probably safe to assume you do not do that, so this argument is not really in good faith. I know that phrase is thrown around a lot pretty willy-nilly, but I think it’s very applicable here. It also does not make you a bad person for not sending them that money. I don’t do that either. I just don’t think it’s a good argument for that reason.
If you actually did that, then I would think you are more or less honoring the spirit of the law. Yeah, that doesn’t hold up in court, but at least the ethics of it is a little more consistent. Then you get a little bit into a sticking point about other people involved in the process who are being cut out, such as an editor or a VA doing audiobooks. But that’s getting pretty thick in the weeds/doesn’t universally apply so I’m not going to really hammer that point.
My take on this is summed up much better by Cory Doctorow, and best written up in the foreword of his book “Makers”, which he published for free online.
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That’s a great excerpt and I’m now interested in this book but it doesn’t really address the issue of money not going to the creator. He’s just in a position where he can afford to go without the income. Millions of artists can not. I imagine neither of us wants art creation to be solely the domain of the wealthy. Reminds me of how in college the only people who could do “good” internships were those who could afford to go a summer (or longer after college) without income and live in D.C. and other expensive cities. It’s wrong to not pay people to do a job of course, but that was a major secondary issue. Only people with money could get the internships that got them jobs that made good money.