Piracy is Good: The Moral Imperative of Sharing Knowledge
FactorSD @ FactorSD @lemmy.dbzer0.com Posts 0Comments 25Joined 2 yr. ago
It does matter though - The price paid to the creator was based on the prospect of X number of sales or Y numbers of adverts. Almost everyone who presently is trying to get their creative works seen is hoping that being seen helps them to "make it" and be able to write or sing or whatever as a full time job.
It's true that SaaS does stop you from owning software... But what good does "owning" a piece of software do you if you can't get updates anyway? Back in the pre-internet era we got used to software existing as discrete versions but it hasn't been like that for a LONG time. As soon as patching became a regular occurrence, "ownership" became a service contract with a CD attached. Then the CD vanished, and it just became a service.
While I do dislike needless "as a service" stuff, that model does genuinely suit a lot of people. It's not a conjob; companies offer this stuff because a lot of customers want it. Most of the companies that are selling you SaaS stuff themselves use SaaS things in-house.
There is cultural value in entertainment. And as modern people we have a need for meaningful forms of entertainment that help us process and make sense of the world. But it's still not "knowledge". Knowledge needs to be free because there is no set way to use it; but Curb Your Enthusiasm is just a thing to watch for entertainment. If you are a legit Curb scholar then you have a copyright exemption, even.
You can object to the ludicrous avarice of studios and networks while still saying that creative work is real work, and that even if we personally can't afford or don't want to pay for it, that society as a whole should reward creativity.
Knowledge does want to be free, but its a stretch to say Guardians 3 is a unit of "knowledge". Creative works kinda don't want to be free; Guardians is only desirable because of the cast and crew's work, and you acting out the script is not the same at all. We shouldn't devalue creative labour, even as pirates.
Piracy cuts into the profits of studio investors, and that's good, without impacting how much actors and crew are paid. Win/win.
Man that is an absurdly difficult issue to address. Yes, you are right that copyright is just awful for everyone. But really the problem is not copyright per se, it's that (for example) Amazon preferred to burn hundreds of millions of dollars to get the rights to an IP when they were going to make up their own story anyway. If Tolkein's work were PD (which it should be, btw) it would have saved Amazon some money but they still utterly lack any good ideas and felt that being linked to a famous work would turn a terrible set of scripts into a sure fire winner.