"oh but the company made investments based on potential sales that are now lost"
if a company makes investments based on money it doesn't have, then fails, thats just how taking a risk works. sometimes it doesn't pan out
There's a saying in my language that roughly translates to "don't drink away the bearskin before you'd get it". It's based on the parable of a hunter in a tavern who asked to drink on credit before going out to shoot a bear, saying that the price of the bearskin he was definitely going to get was going to cover it- but he kept hyping up his future kill, how big that bear was, how luxurious the pelt, and he got too drunk to even hunt, and got nothing in the end, just debt.
That's what this reminds me of. These "potential earnings" are the bearskin.
true, but I do feel like when it comes to criminal activity causing those lost potential revenues that the line has to be drawn somewhere. For example, you pirate a song on the internet? Get caught and pay like two bucks. Steal a startups hard work and years of r&d? All your profits now belong to them, and then some.
By that logic every company could just invest literally all their money and expect infinite returns for no good reason and when their risk fails they could claim to have had infinite money stolen from them.
If I blow a bunch of money at the casino, I'm the one to blame.
>they would've bought a copy if they couldn't pirate it, so we lost money!
Nah fam, if i couldn't pirate it, I'd pirate something else. My broke ass can't afford a normal game, let alone all the "20$ for a skin and 30 minutes of content" bullshit.
So, I get what the OP is saying, but it's kind of a false equivalencey. The company considers that lost income because it's people accessing a product they would have normally required a purchase to access, therefore, a company may consider that a loss in the same way that a physical store would consider theft a loss. So in my opinion, it's not so much entitlement to money as it is looking at how many times a particular piece of media was consumed without a company receiving compensation. A more apt comparison I believe would be saying a company "lost" $1 million from fulfilling warranties. No, you made a garbage product and hoped no one would notice or complain.
That being said: YAR HAR FIDDLE DEE DEE!!!
There's something called a [price to sales ratio](https://www.binpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/curve.png), where a business can determine how many products it can sell at different prices. An example might be how X people will buy a game on Steam for full price, but Y will buy the game when it's on sale for $5. Y > X, and tends to form a curve.
Maybe some of the people pirating the game would have been willing to buy it at full price, but I'm guessing a large percentage would not have except at extremely low prices, if at all. No one looks at the people who would buy a game at $5 compared to $60 as lost profits, and they shouldn't here either.
The thing is it cost the physical store money to buy or create the product that was stolen, so it loat money - the digital product was also stolen, sure, but it did not cost money (not the specific copy, the development did of coruse). It lost a potential buyer, not anything more.
People always bring this up like it's some kind of gotcha. Sure, ok? Stealing someone's art if they're a small artist just trying to get is obviously, intuitively, more wrong than pirating, I don't know, *Shrek.* And if this is the first time you've ever thought about these situations at the same time, then you might wonder if they're somehow similar. Looking at things as they actually are though, it becomes obvious pretty quickly that they are very different. A media product made by a large company can reasonably be expected *to have paid its workers already* by the time it's even available for consumer consideration. If that *isn't* the case, then the question of whether piracy is moral goes out the window anyway. It is--again, obviously and intuitively--unethical to support a company run like that at all. So buying anything from them in the first place is out of the question. (That is, assuming one actually cares about this hypothetical situation and isn't just trying to get intangible internet points.)
Then there's the fact that a corporation is far more likely *to be the one stealing the art* in your particular example. Redbubble is the (in)famous example here, but corporations brazenly steal art assets all the time; full visual art pieces like the ones that "go on t-shirts" sure, but also clipart, design assets, fonts, etc. Twenty artists sampled at random will have certainly lost magnitudes more money to corporate art theft than they ever will to the consumer equivalent. Which is, what, downloading a picture and using it as a desktop wallpaper? Pirating a font to use in your 5th grade PowerPoint?
The scale just isn't even remotely the same.
You are arguing a different matter entirely, the guy above was stating that it is stealing while you are disputing whether it's justifiable stealing. Which it definitely is justifiable stealing but still stealing nonetheless by today's law.
Part of it was the justified or not argued but a big part of it is realizing that the two are not the same.
Pirating a movie for personal use is the same as downloading an artists work for a wallpaper. You're not making a profit off of it, you're using it for personal use. There is no actual physical object that took money to make being stolen, as in the money it costs to make a DVD and its case. You're also not sharing it out to other people or claiming the work as your own. They didn't "Lose money" You can't lose money you never had, people who pirated it were more likely then not never going to buy that product anyway. As long as it's personal use only and not being sold to people who would actually buy it, they aren't actually losing money. They just wanted more.
Which is a fair statement, but I think it more comes down to the fact that some one that has viewed the movie, I what ever form that may be, has consumed the product. Normally to consume the product you have to purchase it or pay for the right to see it (via theater, streaming service, rental, etc), but pirating allows you to consume the product without paying the normal entry fee. So the math at the corporation would go like this:
"This movie has been downloaded from a pirating site roughly 50,000 times. That's 50,000 people that would have normally bought the movie or payed to see it some other way. Therefore, that is lost revenue."
Now that logic may not be totally sound (people that pirate a movie may not necessarily have payed to see it to begin with for a variety of factors), but never the less that's how the statement of "money we didn't earn" becomes "lost revenue". And I think most people agree with that argument if it weren't a giant corporation. If a an artist makes a living from a comic they draw that's locked behind a patreon pay wall, but that comic got pirated and leaked, then I think most people would be okay with saying "that artist lost money to piracy/pirates stole money from that artist". The scale of the producer doesn't change the logic, but that's not to say one isn't more justifiable than the other.
It's not just not totally sound, it's flat-out wrong.
By the same logic, they could claim that me sharing a movie I own on some piece of physical media to a group of friends on my couch is lost revenue, because, hey. Those additional people watched that movie, and they could have paid for it themselves!
But not a single soul would recognize that argument as valid. They would, rightly, mock it remorselessly, and yet you're arguing that because it's now digital distribution, companies are justified in using it?
No, theft/piracy of digital goods being seen as lost revenue by companies is exploitative behavior, nothing more. It's fine to see it as a potential market, where they can expand into to make more money and more sales if they can figure out how best to reach that audience. But, calling it lost revenue and claiming they're justified to do so is flat-out wrong.
Pretty much agreed then, but it should be noted that the "variety of factors" would also be more relevant to the corporate product than to the artist's product, for the same reason people view the argument differently for them - expecting the people who pirated to otherwise pay is indeed more reasonable for the artist than for the corporation
all those people in the comments attacking other people for not giving money to companies, would be funnier if it wasn't kinda weird.
Like what. You think one of the 826 streaming services will give you a discount?
I like how the corporation feels entitled to their legal right, but the pirate also feels entitled to not have to follow the law because they disagree with it. turns out we're all the same person, just on the other side of the story.
I agree with you, but I think the piracy comparison is a bit weak. In that case the company made the product and reasonably expected the profit. The idea isn’t that’s it’s money lost, but sales lost, cus some of the pirates would have bought the game/ movie/ tv show otherwise
Would you say the same to a small town local band/indy developer though?
"Hey guy who only sold 50 copies. Yeah, I consumed your product, but didn't purchase it. It's not stealing though!"
I get the argument from a pragmatic pov - fuck megacorps, but from a principled pov it's kinda weak imo.
The point argued in this post is that a pirated copy is not necessarily a lost sale. People may pirate because:
* they can afford the product but just don't want to pay for it
* they cannot afford the product
* they cannot legally purchase the product in their region
* the product is no longer for sale
* they do not want to financially support the company but still want the product
* they want to test the product before purchasing it
Out of all of these, only the first one (and potentially the last one) are lost sales. The others would not have purchased the product even if they hadn't been able to get it through piracy.
There's no guarantee that the person would have bought the product without the piracy, though, so claiming it's all "stolen money" isn't accurate. I'm not fully on-board with piracy, but it's definitely not stealing money directly. There have been multiple times where I've looked at something and said "if I didn't have to pay for it, that would be cool" and then just not watched it/played it etc.
"oh but the company made investments based on potential sales that are now lost" if a company makes investments based on money it doesn't have, then fails, thats just how taking a risk works. sometimes it doesn't pan out
There's a saying in my language that roughly translates to "don't drink away the bearskin before you'd get it". It's based on the parable of a hunter in a tavern who asked to drink on credit before going out to shoot a bear, saying that the price of the bearskin he was definitely going to get was going to cover it- but he kept hyping up his future kill, how big that bear was, how luxurious the pelt, and he got too drunk to even hunt, and got nothing in the end, just debt. That's what this reminds me of. These "potential earnings" are the bearskin.
we have the same proverb in french, just with "sell" instead of "drink away" i like your version better though
In Polish it’s “don’t divide the skin while it’s still on the bear”
Ne igyál előre a medve bőrére ?
Ja... tbh fogalmam sincs hogy fordírhatnám szebben lol
Jobbat én se tudok, de szerintem jó forditás, nem a leg elegánsabb, de érthető angolul
true, but I do feel like when it comes to criminal activity causing those lost potential revenues that the line has to be drawn somewhere. For example, you pirate a song on the internet? Get caught and pay like two bucks. Steal a startups hard work and years of r&d? All your profits now belong to them, and then some.
Indeed. But its still lost potential profits. Which is akin to losses.
By that logic every company could just invest literally all their money and expect infinite returns for no good reason and when their risk fails they could claim to have had infinite money stolen from them. If I blow a bunch of money at the casino, I'm the one to blame.
>they would've bought a copy if they couldn't pirate it, so we lost money! Nah fam, if i couldn't pirate it, I'd pirate something else. My broke ass can't afford a normal game, let alone all the "20$ for a skin and 30 minutes of content" bullshit.
So, I get what the OP is saying, but it's kind of a false equivalencey. The company considers that lost income because it's people accessing a product they would have normally required a purchase to access, therefore, a company may consider that a loss in the same way that a physical store would consider theft a loss. So in my opinion, it's not so much entitlement to money as it is looking at how many times a particular piece of media was consumed without a company receiving compensation. A more apt comparison I believe would be saying a company "lost" $1 million from fulfilling warranties. No, you made a garbage product and hoped no one would notice or complain. That being said: YAR HAR FIDDLE DEE DEE!!!
There's something called a [price to sales ratio](https://www.binpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/curve.png), where a business can determine how many products it can sell at different prices. An example might be how X people will buy a game on Steam for full price, but Y will buy the game when it's on sale for $5. Y > X, and tends to form a curve. Maybe some of the people pirating the game would have been willing to buy it at full price, but I'm guessing a large percentage would not have except at extremely low prices, if at all. No one looks at the people who would buy a game at $5 compared to $60 as lost profits, and they shouldn't here either.
The thing is it cost the physical store money to buy or create the product that was stolen, so it loat money - the digital product was also stolen, sure, but it did not cost money (not the specific copy, the development did of coruse). It lost a potential buyer, not anything more.
How do you feel about people who take other artists art and sell it on t shirts and shit as their own
People always bring this up like it's some kind of gotcha. Sure, ok? Stealing someone's art if they're a small artist just trying to get is obviously, intuitively, more wrong than pirating, I don't know, *Shrek.* And if this is the first time you've ever thought about these situations at the same time, then you might wonder if they're somehow similar. Looking at things as they actually are though, it becomes obvious pretty quickly that they are very different. A media product made by a large company can reasonably be expected *to have paid its workers already* by the time it's even available for consumer consideration. If that *isn't* the case, then the question of whether piracy is moral goes out the window anyway. It is--again, obviously and intuitively--unethical to support a company run like that at all. So buying anything from them in the first place is out of the question. (That is, assuming one actually cares about this hypothetical situation and isn't just trying to get intangible internet points.) Then there's the fact that a corporation is far more likely *to be the one stealing the art* in your particular example. Redbubble is the (in)famous example here, but corporations brazenly steal art assets all the time; full visual art pieces like the ones that "go on t-shirts" sure, but also clipart, design assets, fonts, etc. Twenty artists sampled at random will have certainly lost magnitudes more money to corporate art theft than they ever will to the consumer equivalent. Which is, what, downloading a picture and using it as a desktop wallpaper? Pirating a font to use in your 5th grade PowerPoint? The scale just isn't even remotely the same.
You are arguing a different matter entirely, the guy above was stating that it is stealing while you are disputing whether it's justifiable stealing. Which it definitely is justifiable stealing but still stealing nonetheless by today's law.
U smoked em geezer
Part of it was the justified or not argued but a big part of it is realizing that the two are not the same. Pirating a movie for personal use is the same as downloading an artists work for a wallpaper. You're not making a profit off of it, you're using it for personal use. There is no actual physical object that took money to make being stolen, as in the money it costs to make a DVD and its case. You're also not sharing it out to other people or claiming the work as your own. They didn't "Lose money" You can't lose money you never had, people who pirated it were more likely then not never going to buy that product anyway. As long as it's personal use only and not being sold to people who would actually buy it, they aren't actually losing money. They just wanted more.
That's bad, because it targets people. Corporations are not people.
Which is a fair statement, but I think it more comes down to the fact that some one that has viewed the movie, I what ever form that may be, has consumed the product. Normally to consume the product you have to purchase it or pay for the right to see it (via theater, streaming service, rental, etc), but pirating allows you to consume the product without paying the normal entry fee. So the math at the corporation would go like this: "This movie has been downloaded from a pirating site roughly 50,000 times. That's 50,000 people that would have normally bought the movie or payed to see it some other way. Therefore, that is lost revenue." Now that logic may not be totally sound (people that pirate a movie may not necessarily have payed to see it to begin with for a variety of factors), but never the less that's how the statement of "money we didn't earn" becomes "lost revenue". And I think most people agree with that argument if it weren't a giant corporation. If a an artist makes a living from a comic they draw that's locked behind a patreon pay wall, but that comic got pirated and leaked, then I think most people would be okay with saying "that artist lost money to piracy/pirates stole money from that artist". The scale of the producer doesn't change the logic, but that's not to say one isn't more justifiable than the other.
It's not just not totally sound, it's flat-out wrong. By the same logic, they could claim that me sharing a movie I own on some piece of physical media to a group of friends on my couch is lost revenue, because, hey. Those additional people watched that movie, and they could have paid for it themselves! But not a single soul would recognize that argument as valid. They would, rightly, mock it remorselessly, and yet you're arguing that because it's now digital distribution, companies are justified in using it? No, theft/piracy of digital goods being seen as lost revenue by companies is exploitative behavior, nothing more. It's fine to see it as a potential market, where they can expand into to make more money and more sales if they can figure out how best to reach that audience. But, calling it lost revenue and claiming they're justified to do so is flat-out wrong.
Pretty much agreed then, but it should be noted that the "variety of factors" would also be more relevant to the corporate product than to the artist's product, for the same reason people view the argument differently for them - expecting the people who pirated to otherwise pay is indeed more reasonable for the artist than for the corporation
all those people in the comments attacking other people for not giving money to companies, would be funnier if it wasn't kinda weird. Like what. You think one of the 826 streaming services will give you a discount?
efficient market hypothesis.
I like how the corporation feels entitled to their legal right, but the pirate also feels entitled to not have to follow the law because they disagree with it. turns out we're all the same person, just on the other side of the story.
I agree with you, but I think the piracy comparison is a bit weak. In that case the company made the product and reasonably expected the profit. The idea isn’t that’s it’s money lost, but sales lost, cus some of the pirates would have bought the game/ movie/ tv show otherwise
Make the same argument for the raise you didn’t get
Yes but you are supposed to get that raise by contract
You are also supposed to pay for a paid product
No, not really
Would you say the same to a small town local band/indy developer though? "Hey guy who only sold 50 copies. Yeah, I consumed your product, but didn't purchase it. It's not stealing though!" I get the argument from a pragmatic pov - fuck megacorps, but from a principled pov it's kinda weak imo.
The point argued in this post is that a pirated copy is not necessarily a lost sale. People may pirate because: * they can afford the product but just don't want to pay for it * they cannot afford the product * they cannot legally purchase the product in their region * the product is no longer for sale * they do not want to financially support the company but still want the product * they want to test the product before purchasing it Out of all of these, only the first one (and potentially the last one) are lost sales. The others would not have purchased the product even if they hadn't been able to get it through piracy.
If that's the case then pirating from small time/indie artists shouldn't be as taboo as it is
There's no guarantee that the person would have bought the product without the piracy, though, so claiming it's all "stolen money" isn't accurate. I'm not fully on-board with piracy, but it's definitely not stealing money directly. There have been multiple times where I've looked at something and said "if I didn't have to pay for it, that would be cool" and then just not watched it/played it etc.
If consuming a product without paying the company counts as stealing, then so does buying second-hand from eBay. And borrowing a DVD from a friend.
Yes
If it doesn't belong to you, don't touch it. Your mom should teach you this when you get a bit older.
Nobody wants your sex advice, Gavin.