[pyridines]

Here's my two cents, not directed towards you, but to the discussion in general.

If someone wants to lease a product to you, and you would rather they sell it, that doesn't give you the right to pirate it. When the only way to buy a thing is to "buy" a misleading lease, piracy becomes more "permissible", as in people will blame you less for pirating it, but that doesn't make it morally good.

It's obviously a bad thing for the publisher to make it seem like you're buying something, then pull the rug out from under you. It's extremely misleading, maybe it should be illegal. It's definitely a bad thing, even if it's all technically there in the fine print that nobody reads. Pirating the thing in response to this is a situation where two wrongs don't make a right. It's debatable, sure, but it's morally gray at best.

No matter how you slice it, you're still depriving the creators/publishers/etc of the money they ask for in return for the thing you want. Maybe you don't like the publisher, maybe you think the platform is evil, but you are still taking what doesn't belong to you.

A big reason it's bad is the plain ol' categorical imperative. If everyone did it, there would be no more music, movies, games, etc, because the people making them wouldn't get paid. That's true regardless of how the thing is sold.

If you don't like how they're selling it, boycott it. That's fine. It's not like we're talking about essential goods like shelter or food. Most of the time, the discussion is around entertainment.

TL;DR Pirating is morally gray at best, but it is not 100% morally good, and I wish people would be honest about that.

[ndriscoll]

The idea that there would be no more creative works without copyright is pretty obviously false for music (so many people enjoy making music that the only way it could disappear is if we evolve to no longer have ears, and even then it will probably exist in the form of deep bass that you can feel), and most likely false even for things like movies and video games. It may be the case that high budget works become extremely rare, but things like short films would continue to exist, and the existence of things like Spring or various total conversion mods show that even video games would continue. It is definitely false for things like business software, where people will pay for professional services to make their business more efficient.

On the other hand, there are plenty of interesting creative works (e.g. mashups) that are illegal today, and obviously they're being made without monetization. With new tools we even have people making things like Plankton from Spongebob singing Tool songs[0]. There would still be plenty of creativity in the world without copyright.

It's not obvious that we should prioritize the ability to easily fund high budget works over the ability of people to freely share their remixes and mashups, for example.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14yO95OVsLE