this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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this contradiction always confused me. either way the official company is "losing a sale" and not getting the money, right?

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[–] [email protected] 67 points 9 months ago (10 children)

There's a few things about this

  1. Many times you don't own the digital good, you subscribe to it. No I'm not joking, that's why services can usually take it away at any time. You normally own "a licence to play it on a single PC" or similar.
  2. This isnt apples to oranges per se. Selling digital goods is fine, it's copying it. Similar to how photocopying a book and selling it would not be okay.
  3. It's important to note there is a narrative push by companies too. They spend lots of money putting videos on every DVD saying "downloading is stealing" because if society thinks piracy and stealing is the same, it helps them litigate and make more money.
  4. Your idea of a lost sale is a hard one, from a media company point of view, it's about making money. So if you can make people believe "a download is a lost sale" or "sharing a digital file is a lot sale" etc, then you can use that to sue individuals, isps, sharing sites, search engines etc and make more and more money while also having more power over your product.
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[–] [email protected] 61 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Because the book and disc guys couldn't figure out a way to stop you back then.

Nowadays college books have one time codes for tests, and games will sometimes have codes included for inportant unlocks to force used purchasers to pay up.

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[–] [email protected] 66 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

There is no difference, they just want you to believe there is a difference.

Cos if you believe it then they can make more money.

The point: GREED that's the difference.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Dude, of course there is a difference. If you sell a physical good you do not have that physical good anymore. If you sell a digital copy you can keep selling that digital copy because you do not necessarily give it away or delete it.

Saying that there is no difference at all between the two is silly.

To be clear, I am not saying this justifies anything regarding copyright, but it is a difference if you can sell something over and over again or just once.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

There were lots of book copying back in the day, and disc copying too ofc.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

Thats why copying of an immaterial gpod is not stealing because the other person still has the full ownership over their copy.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

Because they somehow don't consider that someone could have copied the books or discs before reselling them, but it immediately comes to their mind with digital copies riddled with DRMs

[–] [email protected] 53 points 9 months ago (4 children)

One thing to keep in mind that may be relevant: copies of non-digital things are different than digital copies.

Digital (meant here as bit-for-bit) copies are effectively impossible with analog media. If I copy a book (the whole book, its layout, etc., and not just the linguistic content), it will ultimately look like a copy, and each successive copy from that copy will look worse. This is of course true with forms of tape media and a lot of others. But it isn't true of digital media, where I could share a bit-for-bit copy of data that is absolutely identical to the original.

If it sounds like an infinite money glitch on the digital side, that's because it is. The only catch is that people have to own equipment to interpret the bits. Realistically, any form of digital media is just a record of how to set the bits on their own hardware.

Crucially: if people could resell those perfect digital copies, then there would be no market for the company which created it originally. It all comes down to the fact that companies no longer have to worry about generational differences between copies, and as a result, they're already using this "infinite money glitch" and just paying for distribution. That market goes away if people can resell digital copies, because they can also just make new copies on their own.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 9 months ago (1 children)

it will ultimately look like a copy, and each successive copy from that copy will look worse. This is of course true with forms of tape media and a lot of others. But it isn't true of digital media, where I could share a bit-for-bit copy of data that is absolutely identical to the original.

There is one exception: reposted memes, they are losing pixels more and more. /s

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Only because of incompetent people using lossy reproduction methods out of ignorance

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

And also just websites compressing images without the user getting any input. A meme that goes from Facebook to Twitter to Reddit to Twitter to Tumblr to Reddit to here will likely be compressed every time it gets reuploaded. Most social media sites use some form of image compression.

And it obviously doesn't help that artefacts from compression are multiplicative.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (5 children)

This is why you use PNG or GIF formats. Lossless compression on the PNG side and a LUT on the GIF side. Nothing to get compressed since it is literally just a grid of numbers and a table with the hex codes.

I really wish the social media companies and phone manufacturers would switch to PNG. So much better than JPG.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

What about physical media containing digital data, e.g. a CD?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (1 children)

It's technically illegal to make a copy of that data for yourself and then to sell the original (while keeping the copy). That obviously doesn't mean it doesn't happen, but...

[–] [email protected] -1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

It's not that straightforward. Copyright is different in that infringement is only enforced by rightsholders through litigation. That means they hato find you, sue you, and make a convincing argument that your backup is harming their market viability.

On that last point, some personal backup is unlikely to be found to be infringing. It's more problematic if it's something shared or done in a significant scale.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

bourgeoisie lobby in the State

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago

Usually, when the question is "why is copyright restrictive in these evil and/or dumb ways" the safe bet is that the the answer is "Disney."

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