[caslon]

https://www.engadget.com/2017-09-22-eu-suppressed-study-pira...

"In 2013, the European Commission ordered a €360,000 ($430,000) study on how piracy affects sales of music, books, movies and games in the EU. However, it never ended up showing it to the public except for one cherry-picked section. That's possibly because the study concluded that there was no evidence that piracy affects copyrighted sales, and in the case of video games, might actually help them."

[RHSeeger]

To be fair, those studies were done in a world where software piracy is against the law in many places, considered wrong by many, and can have real consequences to those that engage in it. Those facts have direct impacts on the amount of piracy that happens. If piracy were completely legal and the average person was comfortable doing it, then the impact on the sales of software would likely be much higher.

It is not unreasonable to argue that some piracy is not a big deal and may, in fact, be helping developers (and producers of other content). However, as soon as you start arguing that it should be legal, expected, and normal to do so, you change the entire landscape.

[bscphil]

Seems like I'm getting a torrent (hah) of comments saying that "piracy isn't that bad actually", when I explicitly said in the comment that I wasn't interested in advocating for or against piracy, and do in fact pirate things myself.

[caslon]

Your argument was, literally, that piracy decreases sales. But all of the evidence points toward piracy increasing game sales. Therefore, the indie dev in your example would make more money.

I'm not saying that piracy is good or bad; I really don't care. I'm simply stating that your argument was wrong.

[bscphil]

That was quite literally not my argument. I gave an example in which piracy decreases sales, to respond to an a priori defense of piracy.

Edit: There is a world of difference between debating a point on deontological ethical grounds and consequential ethical grounds. My point is not about what the consequences are, it's about the fact that a specific a priori ethical defense of piracy like that ddevault gives can't be used to argue that piracy doesn't have bad consequences.

[ohgodplsno]

No, you gave a fully theoretical thought experiment, that attempts to play with emotions (oh no, not just an employee that can't be paid, but an intern, a poor student that cannot feed his family after, because that... wait non that's not what interns do) and tried to spin it as an ethical argument.

[bscphil]

When ddevault said that "no one loses anything" when something is copied, they did not mean that they had looked at all the studies and determined that "piracy is good, actually". They meant that simply by examining the nature of intellectual property as such, we could know that no one ever loses anything when something is copied. This is an implied deductive argument which does not hinge on what conditions actually exist in the world.

In response to a deductive argument, it's always acceptable to try to present a possible world in which the premises of the argument are true and the conclusion is false. It simply does not matter that quite a lot of angry people in this thread are insisting that the world I presented in the example does not actually exist. If the world could exist, then that's enough to show that there's something wrong with ddevault's point, and that's what I wanted to do in my comment.

Ironically, ddevault understood this when hardly anyone else did. They replied to my comment with a slight pivot on the original take. They said that while people might "lose things", it's not the kind of "losing" that matters, because if someone loses something that was never legitimately theirs to begin with, we don't care or worry about this. (The example of Nestle stealing water is used as an example.)

This was a great response from ddevault, because it actually understood what I was getting at. I disagree with the response, but the point is that it understands what is happening at the theoretical level here, and that's crucial.

[caslon]

I gave an example in which piracy decreases sales

Which isn't something that would have happened in the real world, since piracy increases sales.

[bscphil]

Thought experiments do not have to be things that would have happened in the real world.

[caslon]

That's not a thought experiment! That's using a false, unlikely example that goes against all evidence to scarecrow.

[utbabya]

This is not thought experiment, it is straw man.

Here's my thought experiment, they told you studies shows that vaccination is safe, you point out there happened to be a case after injecting a person died. In some places people categorize it as FUD.

Just to be clear I don't have a side in this race, I haven't priated anything for a long time, don't find the need.