Lettuceeatlettuce

Not a wall of text, I spent quite a bit of time carefully breaking down all of my points by numbered section.

If it's too much work for you to go through my post and address each point like I have been doing for yours, then I don't think we have much else to discuss.

One last question: Is it wrong for you to go to a bookstore, read a book, and put it back on the shelf without buying it? What about reading just 75% of it? 50%? How about just the first chapter to see if you like it? Or do you think it would be wrong to even skim the first page without buying it?

Go confess to a priest for being a naughty little pirate lol.

Yeahhh, obvious you don't have anything left to say.

1. You disputed the OP's post where they stated that piracy wasn't stealing by claiming that people like them "needed to hide behind word definitions"

2. Corpos are bad, Capitalism is bad...yes, I stand by those statements because they are true.

3. Yes, it would be better for society at large if everybody pirated from the corpos and stopped funding their monopolistic, anti-consumer, anti-repair, privacy-violating practices. Again, yes this is true, I stand by that, that's the definition of "greater good."

4. Never hand waved the moral implications away of innocent people getting hurt by piracy. What I actually did was contrast the moral bad of that harm, against the moral good of harming the corpos that abuse society at large. I determined that the overall moral good of harming the corpos outweighed the moral bad of harming innocents. I also pointed out the fact that the real harm has been perpetrated by the Capitalists, billionaires, and big media conglomerates, not the pirates.

5. You obviously lack the ability or at least the willingness to address my counterexample about what your philosophy entails. The fact that you thought that was an analogy instead of what it actually was, (a reductio ad absurdum) demonstrates that.

6. I don't need to try, you clearly haven't thought very hard or deep about your position, it's shallow and filled with knee-jerk argumentation.

I suspect strongly that you feel very guilty about your actions, and instead of addressing those feelings, you project them onto others.

I think you do this because you cannot stand the idea that other people pirate things guilt-free, you are jealous of them, so you project your own feelings of shame onto those other people and claim (without any compelling reasons), that those people aren't actually guilt-free, they are just lying to themselves to deal with the shame.

You rage and seethe at those with a clear sense of purpose and vision because you lack those things in your own endeavors, and it galls you.

Nice thoughtful response to my comment, really compelling points!

Oh wait, you couldn't think of any refutations to my arguments, so you just resorted to an ad hominem.

Weak and disappointing. Go somberly stare at your torrenting client, thinking of all the people you're putting out on the streets by "stealing" from them, your darkened and evil soul too corrupted by piracy to ever be redeemed. Lol get over yourself.

You're initial closing statement criticizes people for "...hiding behind word definitions..." when the OP's post is arguing that copying is not Stealing.

It's very telling that your criticisms aren't ever leveled at the system itself, but instead, the people who object to how it is structured.

You frame yourself as a pragmatist who just operates honestly, never raising issue with the exploitative and often abusive practices of these corpos, record labels, executives. I never said piracy doesn't hurt anyone, I said it isn't theft.

Piracy hurts exploitative corpos the most, which is a good thing. It's good to cause harm to evil structures and subvert their authority and power. That's literally the point of social activism.

The fact that some well-meaning and innocent folks are going to get caught in the crossfire is sad, but such is the cost of subverting abusive power structures. Remember, pirates never created those structures, the corpos, billionaires, and corrupt politicians did.

I respect some pirates, I despise others. I tip or buy merch from small time artists whenever I can, often far more than they would have gotten from me buying their art, and far far more than if I streamed their song a few times of Spotify, YT Music, or dutifully watched an ad that played on their channel.

Piracy can be done in an ethical way, or an unethical way, but it's certainly not, "at best, morally grey."

You better go out and buy fast food at every drive-thru you can find, you not buying food from them might contribute to lower sales for that chain, which could lose those workers their jobs. Obviously that's ridiculous, but that argument uses the same reasoning you just used. If your argument is true, then you're a morally grey person at best if you aren't spending as much money as possible on fast food every month, or any other good/service in existence for that matter.

1. Millions of people create things all the time with zero compensation. That's literally why the "starving artist" is a universal stereotype. Plenty of people create things out of passion and self-expression, for shared experiences, and for the good of others.

The idea that everything must have a profit motive behind it or nobody would do it is a Capitalist myth.

2. In most cases of large scale production, the vast majority of people involved are already compensated for their labor. Ironically, often it is the artist/group themselves that don't receive compensation directly for their work, but as a conditional percentage based on overall profitability of the parent label corporation, (who are near universally nasty, scummy, and exploitative.)

3. Doing labor is not a sufficient condition for compensation. If it were, I could go through parking lots, washing people's cars while they are inside, and then present them a bill for my labor. Then, if they refused to pay, I could take them to court for "stealing" my labor from me by enjoying a freshly washed car and not paying the bill.

I could create artwork and demand people buy it from me to compensate me for all the labor I put into making it. Both examples are obviously ridiculous, because while labor very well may be a necessary condition for compensation, it isn't a sufficient condition.

4. You admit that my concert example, at least in certain circumstances works. Which means that it proves my argument. If consuming content without compensation is actually stealing, then people walking past and listening to some of the music in a concert are literally thieves and should be arrested and forced to pay restitution. A ridiculous conclusion to the vast majority of people, even, I would wager, to many anti-piracy folks.

5. I advocate compensating artists for their work if you can and if the artist is independent. I think its morally wrong to support the current exploitative entertainment structure by willingly paying for services and products that are designed to abuse the consumer and in many cases, the very artists that are under their banner.

6. You also never addressed my Rolex example, which is basically a perfect analogy to how digital media is replicated IRL.

You also ignore the idea that an action can become morally right in and of itself depending of the motive. Piracy itself can be an act of protest to support proper orientation of the markets and social norms around the creation and distribution of art.

History is filled with activists engaging in what was illegal and considered immoral at the time, but we look back on their actions now as good and upright. Just because many pirates are nerds that post dank memes doesn't delegitimize their actions.

Labor rights activists a century ago read Socialist theory and distributed cartoons and media mocking rich tycoons and abusive bosses. In other words, they were also nerds that posted dank memes.

Lol, love hearing this moronic argument. If you had the magical ability to point at an object and clone it out of thin air, that also wouldn't be stealing.

If I pointed at a Rolex on a person's wrist and magically an identical copy of that watch appeared on my wrist, nothing was stolen, because nobody was deprived of anything. The net amount of that thing in the world only increased, and nobody was dispossessed of their property.

I hope you've never walked past a concert venue and heard some of the music being performed without being in the venue, otherwise by your logic, you are literally a thief who robbed that artist of their intellectual property and should be arrested and imprisoned. At the very least, made to pay restitution to the artist and record company for the cost of the music you "stole" from them.

Miss me with that bullshit.

Here's a rough summary of my philosophy:

1. Intellectual property as it is typically defined and legally defended is a self-contradictory concept.

2. IP in an ideal world would protect creators from fraud, (others falsely claiming credit for their work.) And would ensure fair payment distribution to the artist and workers directly involved, (not allow giant multi-billion dollar corpos to control and profit off massive swaths of IP).

3. You always have the right to do with your copy of media, whatever you want. Remix, trade, critique, promote, copy, etc.

4. It is always preferable to pirate vs funding corpos.

5. Pay for products that respect you, don't pay to be abused or to help abuse others.

I always try to pay the artist and those actually involved directly.

As for the sound techs, producers, etc that work on a project, most of them are already receiving a salary/wages for their time. So I disagree with Louis that pirating media generally hurts those folks.

The artist usually has some conditional debt where the record label requires them to cover some portion of the production costs from sales before they start actually making money. This is frequently a very exploitative arrangement that favors the studio and label. (See points 4 & 5)

There is no perfect solution. If the artist is small enough, direct sales of merch and media is the best option. This is what I try to do as much as possible.

I think another point is that art is fundamentally not a commodity, or at least, shouldn't be treated as such. Capitalism corrupts everything it touches, art is no exception. Artists who are truly passionate about their craft will create no matter what, as evidenced by the far larger portion of "starving" artists in the world vs wealthy ones.

I hate that music, film, paintings, and such are now treated as portfolios of investments by billion dollar corpos and rich fat cats who don't give a shit about the purpose of art and just want to get rich.

Pay for products and services that respect you. Don't pay to support abusive and exploitative industries if you can avoid it. Support genuine artists. Everything will always be fuzzy, make your best call. Copying is not theft. Corpos are scum.

Good job, you're making a good choice! I'm on a Pixel 6 running GrapheneOS, love it. Takes a bit if TLC at the beginning, but it's really nice and functional for me now.

For podcasts, I use Podverse. Works well for me, and runs well on GrapheneOS.

Same pattern as crypto. Hype the tech, spend millions on developing chips that can only do one specific thing, deploy them in a virtual gold rush, eventually the bubble pops and the last fools are left holding the bags trying to offload stacks of ASICs that are worthless.

Billions wasted trying to capitalize on "AI" that will largely cause more harm than good.

Proxmox is really good, same with XCP-ng. You could also run something like Debian server and roll your own KVM based platform if you have the chops.

Overall, lots of solid choices in the Open Source realm. I would avoid proprietary solutions, since that's largely the reason the whole VMWare situation happened in the first place.

Large portions of IBM, Rackspace, Alibaba, Oracle, and AWS's cloud infrastructure are powered by the Xen Project hypervisor, which is the core of the XCP-ng stack.