General_Norris wrote:Ivo wrote:Your comparison(s) here suck. [...]If you pass by a street performer and don't tip him, you are not setting his salary to zero.
I beg your pardon?
Whether piracy removes the item or not from sale has no bearing on whether you are entitled to the work without the owner's permission, which you aren't.
Indeed, which is why I said that your main point was valid, but your comparison sucked.
I don't know what part of the street performer remark I made was confusing. The main point was that there is a difference between passing by one and not contributing, even if you stop and enjoy the act for a good while; and passing by one and taking his earned pile away. Only the later is theft, and only the later would be setting the "salary to zero".
Street performers may not like it when someone enjoys the fruits of their labour without paying, but they have to accept that they are performing in a way where people can "access the commodity" for free. This is generally legal actually. In their case it can even be legal (as far as I know and this depends on the country) to record the performance, provided they are doing it on an entirely public place. Most likely it stops being legal if you try to commercialize the recording without consent though.
In cases like TV series, recorded music and games content creators are lucky enough to have laws against piracy (although some of them may not make much sense, I agree with the general idea).
I think content creators should nonetheless understand the philosophy governing street performers, in the sense that they too are effectively "performing in a public place": by making their work available it necessarily goes out of their control to a great extent - even if many of them try unsuccessfully to retain control, often at great inconvenience to the paying customers (there are exceptions to this, like MMOs, but most "DRM" solutions end up proving ineffective and/or a nuisance to paying customers, and the actual enforcement of copyright law by authorities is also generally considered ineffective).
You can think of live performances by musicians, which are usually done in private spaces (and therefore can not be legally recorded - but often are), putting any content on the web, or think of stuff that can be easily copied (CDs, DVDs, mp3 files, whatever), games that have their DRM cracked quite near the release date. Whatever content is made available to consumers is prime for being recorded / copied / distributed without the creator consent.
You can say the same for goods - if you make them available they are prime for being stolen - but a huge difference is that by stealing X, the legitimate owner no longer has X, so it is taken more seriously (and rightly so) by authorities and is also easier to enforce the law - due to logistics and other reasons (one of which being that more people wouldn't steal even if they knew they wouldn't be caught, because there it is crystal clear that they are really harming the owner, and by how much).
What matters is that you are not the rightful owner so you can only access the commodity if and when he wishes to.
It's that simple.
This is obviously false. It may be true that you can only *legally* access the commodity if and when he wishes to. It is not that simple.
