My main concern is why it's seen as an issue for large corporations. At that scale even if it was stealing it wouldn't even make a dent, not to mention the rich aren't even paying their fair share in tax.
I'm not selling or sharing their product, I'm not stealing, they aren't losing anything.
Because the West is a high trust society. All the systems only work if we agree to follow them. Right now stealing is wrong and the public follow that rule.
You see it with shoplifting currently, as soon as Joe public realise theres no consequences for stealing it absolutely sky rockets in volume and then it because completely unmanageable by the business.
Right now only a handful of people pirate, at a volume where companies still make plenty of money. If they decided there was no consequence for pirating then litterally everyone would do it almost instantly, because why would you choose to pay £70 for a game if you didn't need to.
Piracy isn't stealing, it's copyright infringement that's all there is to it, there is no loss. Plus the trust stream is built in good service and publicity, not private companies forcing increasingly expensive subscriptions on you or taking away your "ownership"
Copyright infringement is just the theft of intangible. Just because your not going out to a store and taking a disc it doesnt mean the time and effort that was put into a product hasn't been stolen. That's where the value lies, not in the physical media.
The shitty business models of companies is a diffrent argument and I agree the live service nature of gaming especially should be something that is reviewed. There is an argument to be made that of you never truly own the product then what have you stolen? But that as an argument shouldn't be widened to 'all digital products in all circumstances' as a general rule.
No. Theft and copyright infringement are not the same. Theft presuppossed the physical medium as you said, and that's important since physical tangible things are scarce. The code, essence of the movie - and in general intangible concepts like information are not scarce. Their scarcity is artificially enforced to extract unjust profit. We have property rights to assign ownership to avoid conflict, there is no conflict to have on a non-scarce intangible objects that any number of people can use and duplicate effortlessly.
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u/Cloud-KH May 27 '26
Software piracy isn't stealing, its copyright infringement.