What is your opinion on the following argument defending piracy, as in copyright infringement: “Piracy can’t be stealing if paying for it isn’t owning”
As an artificial intelligence, I don’t have personal opinions or feelings. However, I can provide an analysis of the argument. This assertion appears to be examining the complex relationship between ownership, copyright, and piracy. While it’s true that purchasing certain types of media doesn’t confer full ownership rights in the traditional sense (you cannot replicate and distribute a DVD you bought, for instance), it doesn’t necessarily justify piracy. From a legal perspective, piracy is considered a form of theft as it involves the unauthorized use or distribution of copyrighted material. The argument could be seen as an attempt to redefine or question these understandings, but that doesn’t necessarily change how they’re treated by the law.
It’s hard to say what LLMs are “programmed” to do, as they’re largely untamed beasts of text prediction. In fact, I would suspect its built-in biases are less the result of pre-prompting or post-foundational-model training and really just what a lot of people tend to think online. In a way, it’s more like people in general often equate illegality with immorality.
You can see similar biases in many of the open-source LLMs that are floating around. Even though they’re basically built outside of large corporate cultures and large-scale monetary incentive, they still retain a lot of political bias that tends to favor governmental measures heavily.
I don’t know about other open-source LLMs but OpenAI is very careful to make sure ChatGPT operates a certain way, according to whatever values reflected by the company itself.
For example, they recently patched GPT4. Before it was able to provide a summary of online articles including those under a pay wall. Now if you tried to ask GPT4 the same question you’ll get a response saying that you would have to pay for it (or something like that).
Providing a summary of an article under a paywall isn’t even illegal (it’s like asking for a summary of a book you didn’t buy) but in this case it doesn’t reflect the view of OpenAI. The model itself didn’t appear to be bias, regardless, the code was changed by humans to prevent it from providing specific information in order to conform to OpenAI’s personal views.
Like I said, I’m aware of extant measures to try and steer models, but people often assume a level of craftsmanship in censoring models that simply does not exist. Jailbreakchat.com is an endless stream of examples of this very fect; it’s very hard, especially with the limited context lengths of current models, to effectively give them any hard directives.
And back to foundational models, which are essentially free of censorship, they will still exhibit a similar level of political bias unless prompted otherwise. All this to say that, discounting OpenAI’s attempts to control their models, the model itself will inherently learn from and mirror the real-world biases of the text it was trained on. Those biases happen to fall along lines that often ignore subtlety in debates regarding illegality and morality.
ChatGPT isn’t the right tool to ask questions about morality to anyway. You shouldn’t criticize it for failing to do something it was never designed for.
Copyright infringement laws vary but even though simply downloading copyrighted material is against policies, it’s hard to enforce and most copyright holders don’t always find grounds for a lawsuit or it’s straight up not worth pursuing.
You downloading a movie off a website is the same as a friend of yours sharing the same movie with you on a USB stick.
Actions against unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials (especially if it’s for profit) on the other hand are much more easily enforceable.
Downloading and watching is a crime. One night be able to say they didn’t know what they were downloading but likely the file name and site or torrent is a good clue that’s bullshit.
Your probably discussing chance of getting caught. You likely will see a DMCA complaint or something like that to your ISP at worse for downloading but enough of these might get your service terminated (some ISP don’t care.)
Sharing the files and usually sharing a lot of files publicly or semi publicly will get you more attention and that will get the media companies more likely to take you down as a distributor.
VPN and smart browsing habits will reduce a lot of this risk though.
Think of downloading is one star in GTA. They will chase you if they are you. Uploading is two stars when they start shooting at you. Profiting of it is like three stars and that’s when they get more aggressive. You can get busted at one star but it’s just very unlikely.
I don’t know if it’s the creators so much as the owners of the copyrights.
One of the problems with the system is how easy it is for big entitys to consolidate ownership of content.
I just want to point out to anyone who thinks this is a viable legal defence, It isn’t.
You would be considered to be stealing from the rights holder.
The rights holder authorises your use of their property when you pay the license fee. If you don’t pay the license fee you are considered to be stealing their property.
Just to be clear, I agree with the sentiment of this post. Legally speaking though, this defence would be cut down in moments.
Of course it is no viable defense, but stealing is the wrong term, because stealing is used for the theft of physical goods missing somewhere else. This would be along illegal usage semantically, or as another comment pointed out copyright infringement.
I’m not a lawyer, but my understanding is that I’m the US at least, it’s still not theft, but copyright infringement, which also means it doesn’t get handled in criminal court, but is instead handled as a civil lawsuit.
Nope, it’s not. It’s in the terms of service. If you don’t like that, don’t sign the contract with them. Steal it if you want to. I’m cool with piracy, just not with the poor attempts at justification.
Seriously… these people are just bending over backwards to make themselves feel better. You’re stealing. Just acknowledge that and be done with it. Don’t make lame excuses for why your stealing is ok.
This is what I’ve been saying. We don’t even own digital products, all it takes is a server to be taken down or an account to be lost and all you bought is taken away. Pirating also can’t be stealing because we aren’t taking something away from someone else, other people are not deprived of the chance to have this just because we downloaded it.
I assume you are referring to a physical copy of the Sega CD. As long as you still own a Sega CD you can play physical copies of games. Recently PlayStation closed down their online service for PS3 so you cannot access any digital games you may own even if you still have a PS3.
Kind of depends which angle we approach it from. Someone does have to first purchase the game to get a DRM free copy to make (legal) copies to share. It’s not really stealing outright, and publishers understand that they’re giving their customers the option to share their games with others when they sell on GOG.
In this view, then it’s kind of like paying it forward. Those who cannot afford it can use it for free. Those who can are encouraged to pay, get their own copies and pass it along to others at disadvantage, like sharing infinitely replicateable books.
Admittedly it’s a more optimistic view assuming most people would do that. But, if pirates pay for Stardew Valley, it means there are people who abide by this.
I did see an add for a digial game storefront that lets you sell your games yesterday. Seemed interesting, but I’m willing to bet you only get 5% of your original payment back
I pirate movies because I think digital access to them is overpriced, goes to the copyright holder instead of the creators, it’s convenient and most importantly because I can.
I can’t pirate going to the cinema, nor can I afford to build my own, therefore I gladly pay to have a seat and enjoy a movie there.
Edit: I thought this may be relevant to the movies example I gave. I don’t think movie studios, giving nothing back to society after massive profits are the ones we should debate the morals of stealing with.
To be completely frank, I couldn’t care less if it’s stealing or not. They should sell their shit for cheaper if their companies care so much, which I’m not sure they really do.
I can’t believe we are actually talking about this. There is a difference between owning and renting. I’m financing my car, I’m paying to own it. After the payments are done, it’s 100% my car. Movies say “purchase” and literally outright don’t let you download and own a copy of the movie that you just paid full price for. I remember trying to purchase a TV show on YouTube and it stated that it’ll “expire” after two years of time of purchase. Bitch, you’re asking me to pay $100 for this shit. They have option to “rent” and to “purchase” and the expiration is on both, except one expires in 24 hours and the other in 2 years. Fuck that
Seems I hit a nerve. I don’t disagree with what you’ve put. The biggest issue here is the fact they say purchase rather than rent. I’d much rather I purchase a movie and own it but that’s not the business model they offer. In reality, if the continue with their current model they should rename it.
Right, but they won’t change the name, because they know your average Joe would just walk away from it, so they just keep it sketchy and keep fucking people over.
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What is your opinion on the following argument defending piracy, as in copyright infringement: “Piracy can’t be stealing if paying for it isn’t owning”
As an artificial intelligence, I don’t have personal opinions or feelings. However, I can provide an analysis of the argument. This assertion appears to be examining the complex relationship between ownership, copyright, and piracy. While it’s true that purchasing certain types of media doesn’t confer full ownership rights in the traditional sense (you cannot replicate and distribute a DVD you bought, for instance), it doesn’t necessarily justify piracy. From a legal perspective, piracy is considered a form of theft as it involves the unauthorized use or distribution of copyrighted material. The argument could be seen as an attempt to redefine or question these understandings, but that doesn’t necessarily change how they’re treated by the law.
ChatGPT: Your argument is invalid because it doesn’t change the legal reality of things.
Me: The legal reality needs changed.
ChatGPT equates everything that is illegal with being immortal. Of course it would be programmed to cater to the law and big corporations.
It’s hard to say what LLMs are “programmed” to do, as they’re largely untamed beasts of text prediction. In fact, I would suspect its built-in biases are less the result of pre-prompting or post-foundational-model training and really just what a lot of people tend to think online. In a way, it’s more like people in general often equate illegality with immorality.
You can see similar biases in many of the open-source LLMs that are floating around. Even though they’re basically built outside of large corporate cultures and large-scale monetary incentive, they still retain a lot of political bias that tends to favor governmental measures heavily.
I don’t know about other open-source LLMs but OpenAI is very careful to make sure ChatGPT operates a certain way, according to whatever values reflected by the company itself.
For example, they recently patched GPT4. Before it was able to provide a summary of online articles including those under a pay wall. Now if you tried to ask GPT4 the same question you’ll get a response saying that you would have to pay for it (or something like that). Providing a summary of an article under a paywall isn’t even illegal (it’s like asking for a summary of a book you didn’t buy) but in this case it doesn’t reflect the view of OpenAI. The model itself didn’t appear to be bias, regardless, the code was changed by humans to prevent it from providing specific information in order to conform to OpenAI’s personal views.
Like I said, I’m aware of extant measures to try and steer models, but people often assume a level of craftsmanship in censoring models that simply does not exist. Jailbreakchat.com is an endless stream of examples of this very fect; it’s very hard, especially with the limited context lengths of current models, to effectively give them any hard directives.
And back to foundational models, which are essentially free of censorship, they will still exhibit a similar level of political bias unless prompted otherwise. All this to say that, discounting OpenAI’s attempts to control their models, the model itself will inherently learn from and mirror the real-world biases of the text it was trained on. Those biases happen to fall along lines that often ignore subtlety in debates regarding illegality and morality.
You got it
leave it up to chatgpt to equate legality with morality
Where did it equate legality and morality? Seems like it only gave legal facts.
ChatGPT isn’t the right tool to ask questions about morality to anyway. You shouldn’t criticize it for failing to do something it was never designed for.
i can if i waaaant to :3
It wasn’t instructed to formulate a moral defense, only a “defense”. Looks like it assumed that meant legal defense.
Very cool, didn’t know we can do that!
I have this one truck the banks don’t want you to know about!
You know what, it’s only 530 here but you’ve really made a good effort at most ignorant post of the day award.
Heh, never thought of this argument.
Unsure if anyone can clarify. But my understanding that simply downloading a watching isn’t an issue.
Selling illegally copied content is what can cause real legal issues.
I’m uncertain of any cases of anyone getting in trouble for simply watching copied content.
Example… 1st user pirates movies or videos and uploads them to YouTube or any streaming company.
2nd User then streams or downloads them to watch them offline. I’ve yet to see the 2nd user in this scenario face legal consequences.
Vs
2nd User then streams or downloads content and makes money off it. Here I see the 2nd user have legal issues.
Again I’m just a regular guy going based on regular guy logic.
Copyright infringement laws vary but even though simply downloading copyrighted material is against policies, it’s hard to enforce and most copyright holders don’t always find grounds for a lawsuit or it’s straight up not worth pursuing. You downloading a movie off a website is the same as a friend of yours sharing the same movie with you on a USB stick.
Actions against unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials (especially if it’s for profit) on the other hand are much more easily enforceable.
Downloading and watching is a crime. One night be able to say they didn’t know what they were downloading but likely the file name and site or torrent is a good clue that’s bullshit.
Your probably discussing chance of getting caught. You likely will see a DMCA complaint or something like that to your ISP at worse for downloading but enough of these might get your service terminated (some ISP don’t care.)
Sharing the files and usually sharing a lot of files publicly or semi publicly will get you more attention and that will get the media companies more likely to take you down as a distributor.
VPN and smart browsing habits will reduce a lot of this risk though.
Think of downloading is one star in GTA. They will chase you if they are you. Uploading is two stars when they start shooting at you. Profiting of it is like three stars and that’s when they get more aggressive. You can get busted at one star but it’s just very unlikely.
Our current system of copyright is flawed and only serves the interests of corporations.
indeed
who do you think got the law created to begin with?
the “creators” of the content, of course. they saw an issue, complained to politicians and the politicians agreed.
it made sense, and it’s IMO quite fair
but if i dont own the shit when i pay for it, then fuck 'em.
I don’t know if it’s the creators so much as the owners of the copyrights. One of the problems with the system is how easy it is for big entitys to consolidate ownership of content.
I just want to point out to anyone who thinks this is a viable legal defence, It isn’t.
You would be considered to be stealing from the rights holder. The rights holder authorises your use of their property when you pay the license fee. If you don’t pay the license fee you are considered to be stealing their property.
Just to be clear, I agree with the sentiment of this post. Legally speaking though, this defence would be cut down in moments.
Of course it is no viable defense, but stealing is the wrong term, because stealing is used for the theft of physical goods missing somewhere else. This would be along illegal usage semantically, or as another comment pointed out copyright infringement.
Legally speaking they’re not going after you solely for piracy pretty much ever, at least not in America, unless you’re making a profit from it.
I’m not a lawyer, but my understanding is that I’m the US at least, it’s still not theft, but copyright infringement, which also means it doesn’t get handled in criminal court, but is instead handled as a civil lawsuit.
Of course it isn’t. Copyright laws were written by the same kind of people who decided that corporations gets to “people.”
This is why I only carjack rental cars, it’s totally not stealing!
Good counter metaphor. When Audible disappears my book, and I can’t do anything about it, that is theft.
Nope, it’s not. It’s in the terms of service. If you don’t like that, don’t sign the contract with them. Steal it if you want to. I’m cool with piracy, just not with the poor attempts at justification.
Seriously… these people are just bending over backwards to make themselves feel better. You’re stealing. Just acknowledge that and be done with it. Don’t make lame excuses for why your stealing is ok.
When corporations write the laws, the laws help corporation.
This is what I’ve been saying. We don’t even own digital products, all it takes is a server to be taken down or an account to be lost and all you bought is taken away. Pirating also can’t be stealing because we aren’t taking something away from someone else, other people are not deprived of the chance to have this just because we downloaded it.
Or the service is no longer supported. I remember buying some PS3 games digitally but can’t access them on my PS5. Load of BS.
I can’t play my Sega CD games on my PS5 either; difference is that I’m not complaining.
I assume you are referring to a physical copy of the Sega CD. As long as you still own a Sega CD you can play physical copies of games. Recently PlayStation closed down their online service for PS3 so you cannot access any digital games you may own even if you still have a PS3.
And there’s no other way to play those games. They’re pretty much gone forever alongside the money spent to purchase them.
This means GoG is the only game storefront you can actually steal from…
Kind of depends which angle we approach it from. Someone does have to first purchase the game to get a DRM free copy to make (legal) copies to share. It’s not really stealing outright, and publishers understand that they’re giving their customers the option to share their games with others when they sell on GOG.
In this view, then it’s kind of like paying it forward. Those who cannot afford it can use it for free. Those who can are encouraged to pay, get their own copies and pass it along to others at disadvantage, like sharing infinitely replicateable books.
Admittedly it’s a more optimistic view assuming most people would do that. But, if pirates pay for Stardew Valley, it means there are people who abide by this.
Well technically you are also leasing from GOG. You can’t resell them and you are legally not allowed to distribute their offline installers.
I did see an add for a digial game storefront that lets you sell your games yesterday. Seemed interesting, but I’m willing to bet you only get 5% of your original payment back
Amen!
Do we really need excuses for pirating media?
I pirate movies because I think digital access to them is overpriced, goes to the copyright holder instead of the creators, it’s convenient and most importantly because I can.
I can’t pirate going to the cinema, nor can I afford to build my own, therefore I gladly pay to have a seat and enjoy a movie there.
Edit: I thought this may be relevant to the movies example I gave. I don’t think movie studios, giving nothing back to society after massive profits are the ones we should debate the morals of stealing with.
To be completely frank, I couldn’t care less if it’s stealing or not. They should sell their shit for cheaper if their companies care so much, which I’m not sure they really do.
If they do that how will they pay the artists millions of dollars… And how will they buy their latest private jet or yacht or whatever.
Most artists never make any money at all…
Well I’m talking about the ones that do. Don’t you think that it’s a bit unevenly distributed?
As an artist, where is my million dollars?
No offense. I’m talking about the ones that do.
I generally don’t pirate… Except if they do some dumb geofencing, then f’em, I tried.
Well paying for it is essentially leasing it, piracy is neither. So…
so lease deez nutz
gottem
How does that work though if you rent a car? You don’t own it, but still stealing if you “steal” it.
You’re preventing its use by someone else (assuming you bring it back in one piece).
how does everybody misses this very crucial point???
Piracy is like a digital photocopier to an NFT
I can’t believe we are actually talking about this. There is a difference between owning and renting. I’m financing my car, I’m paying to own it. After the payments are done, it’s 100% my car. Movies say “purchase” and literally outright don’t let you download and own a copy of the movie that you just paid full price for. I remember trying to purchase a TV show on YouTube and it stated that it’ll “expire” after two years of time of purchase. Bitch, you’re asking me to pay $100 for this shit. They have option to “rent” and to “purchase” and the expiration is on both, except one expires in 24 hours and the other in 2 years. Fuck that
Seems I hit a nerve. I don’t disagree with what you’ve put. The biggest issue here is the fact they say purchase rather than rent. I’d much rather I purchase a movie and own it but that’s not the business model they offer. In reality, if the continue with their current model they should rename it.
Right, but they won’t change the name, because they know your average Joe would just walk away from it, so they just keep it sketchy and keep fucking people over.