>Is the only way of getting and preserving media piracy now?
Piracy is illegal and unethical. You are stealing the property of the rightful owners of the content when you pirate. Yes, copying IS theft - you are depriving the owner of the content from having you not having the content. If the only way to preserve something is to pirate it, then the ethical and legal action is to let it disappear. You do not have the right to choose what happens with movies, music, etc., only the rightful owner can do that.
Combating piracy requires enormous resources on the part of the IP owners, which is taken from budgets that could be otherwise allocated to creating more art. When you pirate, you are stealing not just from the rightful owner, you are stealing from all of society by depriving us of art that would have been created if money didn't have to be spent fighting piracy!
> If the only way to preserve something is to pirate it, then the ethical and legal action is to let it disappear. You do not have the right to choose what happens with movies, music, etc., only the rightful owner can do that.
I disagree.
Every copy of Nosferatu was ordered to be destroyed. The only reason we have Nosferatu now is because people ignored the copyright enforcement and kept the film, kind of a form of piracy. Maybe you think that would be a better world, but I do not.
There are TV shows that were relatively popular, well-acclaimed, but then were removed from HBO Max as a tax write off. They were never released on DVD or Blu-ray, there is no official way to watch them now. If there wasn't piracy, these shows would be lost media. Again, you're free to think that, but I think that's wrong.
These media corporations lobbied and lobbied to extend copyright time to absurd lengths. Forgive me for not crying for them.
It's surprisingly common that the copyright owners don't even have the original work anymore, and the only way they can actually distribute the work is to use the pirated version!
It is a cultural construct based on an objective to "promote the progress of science and useful arts". Due to the creeping length of protection, it is coming close to violating that objective.
Why do I not have a natural right to remix or create derivative works from the stories or music I experienced while growing up?
Copyright duration should be culled back to 14 years, maximum. I might also support an exponentially increasing renewal fee.
I'm old enough to remember a time when you "owned" the content that you purchased. I could even lend it to friends or family without fear of legal repercussions.
Now our corporate overlords own everything they produce, even after you buy (sorry, I mean rent) it.
> Combating piracy requires enormous resources on the part of the IP owners, which is taken from budgets that could be otherwise allocated to creating more art. When you pirate, you are stealing not just from the rightful owner, you are stealing from all of society by depriving us of art that would have been created if money didn't have to be spent fighting piracy!
That's a very bad excuse for an argument. To make the case that any damage is being done by piracy two things need to be true:
(1) that people who pirate would have paid if piracy wasn't an option/harder; (2) that piracy doesn't have other positive externalities for that outweigh the first point.
The publisher paying to fight piracy is purely out of spite if it doesn't have a meaningful impact on (1) or if (2) is true, which it might be:
I will expend a great deal of time, money and energy fighting to make sure that people who say things like "If the only way to preserve something is to pirate it, then the ethical and legal action is to let it disappear" with a straight face will never win.
Before, the owner had this cool thing. It was a bit abstract. But the thing that they had was this. They had a state of being in which you didn't have the content. If you now have the content, you've deprived them of existing in this state. A state where you didn't have it.
I want to to be charitable, but still: the idea that media company invest as much money as they possibly can into creating media, and thus anti-piracy measures would have any impact at all on the amount or quality of art created is just ridiculous.
Especially if you talk about abandoned media. Do you really think not selling old TV shows on dvd is a way to finance new art?
Piracy is illegal and unethical. You are stealing the property of the rightful owners of the content when you pirate. Yes, copying IS theft - you are depriving the owner of the content from having you not having the content. If the only way to preserve something is to pirate it, then the ethical and legal action is to let it disappear. You do not have the right to choose what happens with movies, music, etc., only the rightful owner can do that.
Combating piracy requires enormous resources on the part of the IP owners, which is taken from budgets that could be otherwise allocated to creating more art. When you pirate, you are stealing not just from the rightful owner, you are stealing from all of society by depriving us of art that would have been created if money didn't have to be spent fighting piracy!