The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you’ve already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations.
The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you’ve already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations.
Stealing involves depriving the original owner of access or possession of the item. Duplication is not stealing because the item being duplicated is not taken away.
Even if you consider it stealing, then what defense do you have for the people who paid the price that would supposedly allow them to have it permanently and suddenly it still gets taken away? That’s not stealing? Even if we accepted that piracy by people who didn’t pay is theft, why should people who already paid for the media not be able to access it from somewhere else if their original access is denied?
There is more nuance to it than that. The copyright holder still owns whichever copies are made, whether or not they are made with their permission. One could argue that by making a duplicate, you have taken possession of a copy without consent from its owner.
As for your other example about a copyright owner revoking access; this is completely subject to the terms of sale of that item. Without details of the license agreement it’s impossible to say if the terms were breached.
That is an extremely recent construct largely promoted by the big media companies themselves. For the vast majority of human history, intellectual property was not a thing and works could be freely copied, modified, redistributed, etc and it was considered normal. When copyright first came into effect, it was for a fixed period that was relatively short, after which anyone could use the work however they wanted. That was the original intent of copyright, which was only to give artists an exclusive period to profit from their work without competition, not exclusive rights for all eternity. Disney was the one that lobbied for copyright terms to be extended, then extended again, then again, and critically, extended to include the life of the “person” that created it, but since corporations are also “persons” under the law and just so happen to not have bodies that can die, effectively corporate media is copyrighted forever.
Also, those media companies claim to be such big proponents of intellectual property protection, they would never, ever do the exact same goddamn thing to independent artists, with the only difference being that they actually profit from it when the vast majority of “piracy” is for personal use, and that they know for a fact that independent artists rarely have the resources or time to actually do anything about it, right? Riiiiiiight?
https://mashable.com/article/disney-art-stolen-tiki
https://insidethemagic.net/2023/12/disney-under-fire-for-allegedly-stealing-furry-fanart-ld1/
https://insidethemagic.net/2021/01/super-nintendo-world-stolen-art-ad1
If anything, shouldn’t small independent artists get more protection under the law if copyright was really meant to benefit artists and safeguard the creative process like it claims it does? The FBI can arrest and jail you for pirating a movie, but when a corporation commits the same crime there isn’t even a whiff of consequences. At this point we really ought to ask what the real purpose of copyright is after all the changes made to it and who it’s actually meant to protect.
Gee, it almost sounds like the laws regarding what they can and can’t put in those terms of sale are nowhere close to fair and were specifically written by the giant media holding companies to exclusively benefit them and screw over the consumer! Laws and regulations can’t possibly be immoral and corrupt right?
Dude, thank you for reminding me I’m not fucking insane.
I absolutely agree with you that the arguments you put forward is the way it should be. However, currently, as we see here in the case of Sony, there is a perceived unfairness in what consumers expect from a license agreement and what is in fact in them.
Time will tell if our judicial system acknowledges that it’s reasonable to assume that if you are offered a digital good “to buy” that it will remain available ad infinitum and hence Sony held to be liable.
By duplicating, you’re depriving the company to the exclusive right to copy that thing. But I don’t think stealing some nebulous concept of a monopoly like that is wrong.