[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.

[bscphil]

Let me try to spell it out for you.

ddevault:

> Even with all of that said, I support piracy. Information wants to be free, and games are made of information. No one has lost anything when a game is copied.

"Information wants to be free, and games are made of information" is a defense of piracy that has nothing whatsoever to do with the consequences of piracy. The argument is that copyright claims are morally invalid because they go against the nature of information as such.

This is used to make the claim that "no one has lost anything when a game is copied".

That claim is a bit of verbal trickery, and that's what my comment is complaining about. If a developer has a copy of a game on their hard drive, and after releasing the game, someone pirates it, the developer still has a copy of the game on their hard drive. This is one sense of "not having lost anything", and it's what ddevault understands to be the nature of information that underlies the moral argument I gave above.

But what that moral argument can not tell you is that "no one has lost anything" in the fairly conventional, pragmatic sense that one can "lose a job".

My comment is a theoretical example (or thought experiment) that highlights the difference in a way that makes clear how the words "no one has lost anything" are at least misleading, and potentially hurtful. That is why I begin with the words "suppose" (which is how philosophers often introduce thought experiments) and proceed to give a highly theoretical example about a indie dev studio which does not exist. The upshot is the philosophical point that people can "lose something" (a livelihood) without "losing anything" (a piece of intellectual property).

I have no idea whether, on the whole, piracy is good or bad for video games. Despite your apparent certainty, I do think the jury is still out on that point. But that is most emphatically not the point that I am making in my comment.

[caslon]

> My comment is a theoretical example (or thought experiment)

That goes against all evidence and all studies on the topic and has no supporting evidence to back it up.

[matthewrobertso]

Your argument strikes me as tautological in that you've created a hypothetical sad situation and are arguing that because it is sad we should change our behavior. I think it's probably worthwhile to think about if the situation could actually occur in our world.

Otherwise, why not construct the absurd thought experiment: what if the intern that got laid off won a bunch of money and didn't have to work? Piracy is obviously moral and great because the intern is now rich.

Obviously this wouldn't happen to most interns given how the world works (losing your job is bad). Thus it is a bad thought experiment.

Similarly, if having a game pirated leads to an increase in sales, this is a bad thought experiment.

[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.

[bscphil]

Thought experiments don't need to be realistic when they are responses to deductive arguments. [1]

You can't use a thought experiment to argue that people should change their behavior because of a problem, as you're pointing out - and I'm not doing that. I'm not saying people should not pirate things because piracy is bad for game developers. I pirate things. I'm not making a statement about piracy.

ddevault is doing something rather specific: arguing that because intellectual property rights do not exist, anyone whose work is copied does not lose anything. This is an argument that is contradicted by a possible world in which someone loses something, even if you don't think it's our actual world.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deductive_reasoning