Piracy, in today’s context of unauthorized sharing of digital content, is wrongly condemned as immoral theft. However, it is not piracy itself that is immoral. Rather, it is the greed-driven laws and practices that censor knowledge and creative works to maximize profits. At its core, piracy is about sharing information and creative works with others, which should be seen as a moral good. 🤑
That’s a little disingenuous.
While piracy is not theft, trying to paint it as some kind of morally driven campaign for the preservation and distribution of information is bullshit.
It that was the case, piracy would be focused on a lot different files. Project Gutenberg is about preserving and sharing information. Us? We just want to bypass the capitalist bullshit part of the equation. Even that isn’t true of everyone, because we otherwise wouldn’t be using things like realdebrid. If we, as pirates, really want to contribute, we’d all be scanning out of print books, films, and music as soon as we found a source for it.
Up/down ratios inherently disprove the idea that piracy is some kind of noble pursuit for the vast majority of people.
And even then, you can’t ignore that piracy does break the social contract where someone’s efforts are rewarded in return for their contributions. If I’m making a movie, I can’t be tilling my fields and harvesting crops. Neither can the actors, the sound guys, the camera guys, etc.
These creations we borrow? They represent resources no less than someone building a school, or making a map, or raising chickens. That’s the fundamental contract of a society. We agree, as part of a society, that someone’s efforts in a specialized, and non subsistence field will be treated as having value at least as significant as the time they could habe spent on survival tasks when society didn’t dominate the entire arable planet.
It doesn’t have to be remuneration in capital repayment, but don’t pretend that leeching the creative proceeds of others by piracy fulfills that contract.
We can try to change the system, try to bring it down, whatever. But until then, piracy is never going to be a moral or ethical good. It’s just people taking what they want because they can’t afford it, or don’t want to.
