I fully agree with the general message, but this particular anecdote doesn’t really make sense to me and can easily be waved off by anyone who disagrees with it.

If buying isn’t owning, that means it’s renting or borrowing.

If you pirate it, they get no money and therefore cannot rent it out to you. You cannot just steal a movie from the movie rental store or a car from a car rental place. That’s stealing.

Sure, it’s infinitely reproducible but that’s not what this meme says. That’s an unrelated argument for piracy. It draws a direct connection between the 2 relationships of buying + owning and pirating + stealing. However, one has nothing to do with the other.

When someone owns something, they are allowed to rent it out. It’s always been that way and that’s valid.

The real argument should be “if there was no intention to buy in the first place, then piracy isn’t stealing” or something like that.

Am I completely missing the point or is this analogy completely nonsensical? Quite literally, what someone does with something they own is their business and they get to decide what they let people do with rented content, from a legal standpoint. It’s DRM free content is so important because online platforms are allowed to remove content from you for any reason.

On a side note, I condone piracy and nobody should ever give money to large media corporations. But if we use stupid arguments like this it makes us easier to dismiss.

It’s about them missrepresenting the transaction. If you go to the store and rent a movie then it’s an agreement that it’s temporary. If you buy it then they can’t take it back, what they are doing is fraud and complaining that we don’t want to deal with them.

I agree with everything you said, however that has nothing to do with piracy. It’s a shitty thing they’re doing that we should be mad at, but it in no way sets the definition of piracy, which is what they’re going to try to defend against in any argument.

What we should demand is that they properly define buying, owning, and renting so that we own our products. Piracy is piracy no matter what the definition of owning is. Only the reasons change. One reason is that they treat buying as renting, but it does not change the definition of piracy, no matter what we think the definition is.

I agree with you here, piracy isn’t theft for reasons unrelated to buying and owning. The reason lies with the infinite reproducibility of the product. While I may agree with the sentiment behind the post, it’s not technically a sound argument.

But this is an even more easily defeated argument. It’s suggesting that anything that can be copy-pasted through File Explorer should never have a monetary compensation for its existence. Given the immense hours devoted to making video games, most people would inherently disagree with that. I think the only people who’d lend any credence to the idea would be cheapskates wanting free entertainment.

fun fact: you can sell gpl-licensed software, but anyone who receives the software can distribute it for free