And digital media is similarly fungible, and media companies owning copyright can produce a single copy at insignificant cost — and illegal copies are usually produced at no cost to them too.
If you would rather not consume content than pay with time and money being asked of you, there is no real loss to anyone if you consume an illegal copy.
Convenience is not a valid reason to violate others' rights.
> there is no real loss to anyone if you consume an illegal copy.
There is a real loss: The owner isn’t getting paid when people consume their product for free and without their permission.
The entire point of copyright is to protect the time investment of and opportunity cost borne by the author when marginal reproduction cost is zero, or close to zero. This is because we as a society value intellectual labor. We want people to invent things and produce entertainment, and we incentivize it via the profit motive.
You can’t write software for a living and not understand this. It’s what puts food on your own table. Don’t try to rationalize it.
I've spent the bulk of my career being paid to write software that was published under open source licenses. I was paid to write exactly the software the business needed to be built, with software being the tool for the business to provide value to their customers and not a money extracting scheme.
I've also worked on complex web applications/systems, where operation of the web site is ultimately the cost that needs to be continuously borne to extract profit from software itself. Yes, someone else can optimize and do operation better than you (eg. see Amazon vs Elastic and numerous other cases of open-source companies being overtaken by their SW being run by well funded teams), but there is low risk of illegal use in this case.
Today I am paid to write software that the business believes will provide them profit that will pay for my services. The software I write is tied to a physical product being sold and is effectively the enabler and mostly useless without the physical product itself.
Other engineers at the company I am at are building software that requires a lot of support to operate as it manages critical infrastructure country-sized systems, and ultimately, even if someone could get this software without paying a license, they'd probably have no idea how to operate it effectively.
Most of the internet infrastructure works on open and free software, where at "worst", copyright protections are turned upside down to make them copyleft if software is not available under more permissive licenses like MIT, BSD or even put into public domain.
Companies that used to pay best SW engineering salaries like Google, Meta and Amazon would likely not face any significant business loss if all of their software (source code included) was publicly leaked: SW is a tool for them to provide an ad platform or cloud infrastructure service.
Well, most software engineers aren't fortunate enough to be insulated from the impact of copyright infringement. The reality is that a lot of us--maybe not you personally, but possibly even your friends and neighbors--put food on the table via our intellectual efforts, and that deserves respect. Try to have some empathy.
> Google, Meta and Amazon would likely not face any significant business loss if all of their software (source code included) was publicly leaked
You don't know that. Granted, there are other barriers to entry in some markets, but stealing others' control and data planes would go a long way towards building viable competitors without having to expend the same level of investment.
You're cherry-picking the relatively small number of companies that support your argument. Besides all the software they've built, each of these companies has filed for and been issued mountains of patents (though not copyright, it's another IP protection scheme) and will enforce them if necessary to protect their business. I bet yours might have some, too.
You missed my argument: sw engineers are largely being paid for the labour we put in, and I am saying that we still would be paid for the same labour even if someone did legally (open source) or illegally have access to the software we build.
My company has a ton of patents (which are public) and cares about copyright deeply, but that does not mean that it would be significantly affected financially (other than potentially in stock price, which is an entirely different social aspect).
To give you another example, Windows source code leaked 10 years ago or so. Did it slow down Windows?
Just like authors (owners of copyright) aren't negatively affected if someone creates a copy they would never have paid for.
> we still would be paid for the same labour even if someone...illegally have access to the software we build.
Where do you think that money comes from? It comes from the licensing of the software. If everyone is pirating the software, there’s no market for it, nobody’s going to buy it, and there will be no money to pay for your salary.
> that does not mean that it would be significantly affected financially (other than potentially in stock price, which is an entirely different social aspect).
Stock prices aren’t a “social aspect.” They are a financial instrument that reflects the expected future earnings of the company. Companies aren’t going to form and employ people if they can’t sell their stock because their product has no value in the marketplace.
> Windows source code leaked 10 years ago or so. Did it slow down Windows?
You’re asking the wrong question. That leak, in and of itself, didn’t impact the market for the software. Nevertheless, massive piracy of any software would harm the economy. The fact that most people respect others’ labor is what keeps the market functioning.
> authors (owners of copyright) aren't negatively affected if someone creates a copy they would never have paid for.
We don’t know who never would have paid for a copy of software at any price. And there is a difference between knowing that infringement exists and making excuses for it. The question isn’t whether some people do it and the market is still healthy; it’s whether or not we should condone it so that nobody should feel compelled to follow the law. Because, following your logic, nobody should pay for software. If that happens, tremendous economic harm will follow.
I guess there's some confusion in that I don't think anybody's saying everyone should pirate everything all the time. That would, indeed, be problematic.
But if companies keep pushing people to piracy... well, I'm not going to blame the people first, that's for sure. Especially when things like TFA happen.
No, I don't really see the slippery slope. If there were such a slope, I would imagine that decades into this piracy thing, we'd be sliding down it. Yet most people don't pirate. Strange?
So you really don't understand that it should be OK for everyone to pirate if it's OK for you? Would you ever tell someone it's not OK? If so, why? And what makes you special and different?
You've started with a retort to a point that some who would never pay for some copyrighted work are not a loss to copyright owner if they illegally use their work.
You've since expanded to everyone and SW development, and want to extend it to people who are willing to pay for the value a particular work provides them.
So let's go back to the beginning: can you please quantify how big is a loss to the copyright owner if one watches a movie they would skip if the only option was to pay for it?
No, I'm not going to do that. And here's why: because if you have an excuse, everyone has an excuse. And if everyone has an excuse, the entire system falls apart.
I'll reiterate what I said above: entertainment and software are not life's essentials. Nobody's going to be seriously harmed by being denied access to them.
> Nobody's going to be seriously harmed by us pirating them, either.
The logic here is quite simple: if you don't have to pay, nobody else has to pay, either, because you're not special. If nobody pays, then people who make media and software won't get paid, and production will slow to a crawl. You'll have destroyed the very thing you seem to desire enough to steal.
Maybe because I'm not so arrogant as to imply everyone has to have the same views and act the same way as me, nor to imply that my view is the only right one.
But nah, you're right. Nobody has to pay. Everybody should pirate.
Now, that's been true for decades, of course. So why hasn't the entire system fallen apart?
They are not: if they never travel to Afghanistan or Ethiopia, they will not be subject to their laws.
Laws change even in the same region, so it is also temporal.
And one can work to change the laws too.
But it does not make sense, you have your pre-defined opinion and you are sticking with it, and we do not buy your argument, so it's best we agree to disagree here.
1. A copyright owner can test this easily by offering a discount.
2. Because they are getting significantly bigger value out of it. Because they know ahead of time they want more of this type of content to be produced. Because they have more disposable funds. Because it is available in their country legally. Because their streaming package already includes it. Because their cable package already includes it... Need I continue?
Again, you are conflating is it OK not to pay with any loss of profit: they are not the same even if there is correlation.
Nobody loses any money if you spill profanities at someone, but it's still not OK (even though it might not be illegal either).
Legallity and morality are not always in sync even if we try to keep one reflect the other. I am surprised this is even a discussion point.
> Because they are getting significantly bigger value out of it. Because they know ahead of time they want more of this type of content to be produced. Because they have more disposable funds.
Those are reasons that someone might choose to pay. These are also the same reasons why one might want to donate to charity or to non-profit/public media (PBS, NPR in the USA). In other words, they're a voluntary patron of the arts. And there's nothing wrong with that, when the organizations are non-profit/public or charitable. In fact, I think we'd all encourage it.
However, not every media organization is a non-profit/public operation or a charity. Those who are made a choice to be that. Those who didn't--well, they chose to remain for profit.
The point is that we, as individuals, do not get to override the choice of whether a publisher is for profit or non-profit by taking the law into our own hands--just like I don't get to turn your back yard into a public park when you're not using it. After all, you're not using it, right?
You and others keep saying, "no loss in revenue, no harm done." (Just like, "no loss of use of your back yard, no harm done.") But that's not the point. It's about infringing on others' rights.
> you are conflating is it OK not to pay with any loss of profit: they are not the same even if there is correlation.
This is just silly: Where does the profit come from if nobody pays? Again: if you don't have to pay, it must follow that nobody should have to pay. If you disagree with that, then who gets to choose who pays and who doesn't? You? No; that's for the law to decide. That's how democracy works.
And digital media is similarly fungible, and media companies owning copyright can produce a single copy at insignificant cost — and illegal copies are usually produced at no cost to them too.
If you would rather not consume content than pay with time and money being asked of you, there is no real loss to anyone if you consume an illegal copy.