I've been meaning to post this thread a while. Kinda wanted to share my own thoughts on the subject, and some of what I've heard. Also would like to hear what others here think about it.
First major thing would be, I honestly can see plenty of justifiable reasons to either pirate something, or "infringe upon it". However, I draw the line on commercial infringement. There's of course, also the "Stop when told to" , but this is open to debate, given there's a fair use thing. (or is SUPPOSED to be)
Some of the acceptable reasons I either would have to pirate something, or have heard are:
1. no money, or not enough.
2. not actually supporting the actions or thoughts of the artist/company. (a friend told me this one)
3. realistically knowing you might just throw it away, anyways. (and demo/trial versions of programs tend to suck)
4. At one point owning a legal copy of the copyrighted materials, or even that you already do.
5. For game development software, when you know you're not even going to make any money out of what you do with it.
8. not being able to justify either paying for it, or someone, selling it. *
9. Unaware there's a law about it
And then as for alleged "infringement":
1. fan games / ports / clones
2. parodies
3. music videos or animations
4. original characters
5. fan fictions
6. fan art
7. needing/wanting something, and being unable to find/contact the original creators. Typically, I try to find/contact/credit them, but it's unreasonable for someone to assume this is actually possible 100% of the time. The information tends to change at a moment's notice.
8. not being able to justify either paying for it, or someone, selling the rights to it. **
9. Unaware there's a law about it
Ofc, we've all heard all of the stuff about how piracy and whatnot is a crime, and it's stealing, and etc...
crime: by definition, yes. but the bulk of these pirates certainly don't do it with malicious intent. Big companies and I bet even government organizations sure do, though.
stealing: the problem here is any true "theft" requires the original to be stolen. It's an unauthorized reproduction, but the original is still there. it's by what we've legally extended to be defined as stealing, but it's truly anything but.
loss of money/profits: A simple piece of common sense blows this out of the water. "Don't count your chickens before they hatch". In order to really lose money from piracy, two conditions must be met. Firstly, there needs to be an exchange of money. Secondly, it would need to be exactly, or even more, than what a legal copy is selling for.
it's "immoral and unethical" : The big companies and some artists need to be reminded of this. suing common-folk who happen to be pirates for millions and billions of dollars is beyond either of these definitions. It's also asinine, because odds are, if they didn't have that money to begin with, then there's little to no chance of ever getting it from them. Filing C&D and DMCA for what actually is protected by fair use is completely unacceptable. Oh, and withholding the materials from public domain till basically the end of time, is bullshit. DRM also is clearly not the answer, as it fails too often, and usually tends to be nothing more than a legally distributed virus.
enforceable: not really. Making an example of one or two pirates won't change a thing but to piss the rest off. Rounding them all up requires too many resources, and actually dealing with the bulk of them would require mass torture and execution. And over copyright infringement, there's absolutely no way to justify these extreme measures.
I recently had a little chat with a youtuber who made some videos I like, and he's been dealing with copyright issues so much lately it's not even funny. He's not making money, and what he's doing falls under fair use in the first place. His videos have been getting removed, and he's starting to lose his upload capabilities. He told me that these companies might have millions of dollars, but there are millions of people struggling with this, and if they all filed a class-action lawsuit, there'd be some changes. Told him that yes, this probably is true, but it's unlikely to happen, and some proof in that is how long it took for someone to finally step-up and assert "Happy Birthday" is public domain, by going to court, of course. By the time this has happened, that song is basically dead. No one wanted to pay, so they all just didn't use it, and many made their own version. I also said other stuff, but this was the main point.
If people can't get their shit together, get along, and reform copyright to what it should be, the only actions regarding it which I fully support are those that involve abolishing and outlawing it entirely. Same goes for patents and trademarks. Too many organizations and individuals abuse these systems. The rest don't enforce any part of them correctly.
That should be everything, now I'd like to hear some feedback and your own thoughts on the matter.
*
**
Both of these mainly apply to programs that do relatively simple tasks (or happen to be open source ***), and for which free ones might exist. Same with artwork. My main issue here is with stock art, though, and more specifically, single-color stock vectors, and even more specifically, of things that probably can't even legitimately be copyrighted. I am pissed-off at how many of these I find when searching for reference materials or even ready-to use graphics. Sorry, but Egyptian Hieroglyphs, if they were copyrighted, belong to the Ancient Egyptians! (This is one of many things I needed some quick and decent ref material, and found more extremely low-res stock art than ANYTHING ELSE)
***
I found a JavaScript Library/script one time. Was free to use non-commercially, and they honestly expected people to pay a license fee or something for any commercial uses of it. I was going to use it non-commercially, but decided, thinking ahead, if I ever used it commercially...no. Needless to say, I continued searching for scripts to do what I needed.
I can justify paying to use artwork commercially. I can justify paying for a closed-source library to develop my commercial application. But something that's nothing more than a plaintext script file that was provided for download in its full, original form...EXCUSE ME? How they'd even manage to enforce this in the first place is beyond me.
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