If it satisfies the way in which you want to label me, ok. For what it's worth, I'm typing this on a Pixel 7 and own a MacBook and a Windows 11 desktop for different purposes.
It's really not that different. The main difference is the audience size. For an independent musician selling merchandise, it would be equally insulting to them to tell them that they will be repaid in exposure if they give you one for free.
Making a copy of something "to see if you'd enjoy it" or because it's somehow great for their exposure is mental gymnastics to justify piracy. Let's just call it intellectual property theft and stop beating around the bush.
As every musician knows, exposure is always better than payment! This is why you shouldn't offer payment to musicians at your wedding, since they're getting great exposure already. /s
The key difference here is that you only own the copy when the copyright holder sells it to you. I don't know if you're being obtuse, but this shouldn't be a difficult concept to grasp. If it helps in understanding, try replacing "copy" with "product" and "copyright holder" with "store."
At the time I had seen that it had been forked into numerous private repositories, I believe roughly 100 or so. Perhaps I could have made a claim to have the other app taken down through Google Play, but I had no faith that this would be resolved, and even if it would be, it would be an ongoing problem.
As for whether they would have made open source contributions or not is in the end a moot point for me, because the only change that I observed was that they changed the colors and typeface and extracted the in-game menu into a separate welcome screen. I would not have merged this back into my repository.
While I myself violated the copyleft of my project by taking it closed source, I felt that it was my only resort. I've continued to develop the game over the past few years and by modernizing it and adding additional content, I've been able to significantly outpace my competitor.
For me, this ordeal had been a bit of an eye opener. I came out of university fully supportive of open source and when I discovered how this affected a real world project, I genuinely approached this situation understanding that it was just a risk I needed to accept. However, in the three years that it was available on GitHub, I received only two small PRs, and combined with the license violations, I felt that there was really no advantage to keeping it open source.
While this is just my anecdote, it has changed my perspective on how open source can realistically work more broadly. I honestly can't envision any kind of business that needs to offset large production costs able to publish that content viably as open source.
Your frustrations with streaming services are very relatable and I completely agree that the space has become increasingly fragmented. I, too, have cut down on some subscriptions where I feel that I don't get my money's worth.
I believe your case is a perfect example of intellectual property theft: your 40 customers are paying you instead of paying the copyright holders. If you hadn't offered them with this solution, it's not unreasonable to think that they would be more willing to spend that money on purchasing it directly from the legitimate owner. Consequently, it can be argued that your shared library is incurring damages through missed revenue. By extension, even by an iota of a percentage, the service provider or the production studio will need to recoup that in the ways I've mentioned.
So while I completely understand your rationale for pirating, surely we can agree that in cases like these, there is some—no matter how little—degree of legitimacy to the assertion that piracy is detrimental to those of us who pay for our subscriptions.
There will be a portion of pirates that never intended to spend money, but surely there will also be at least some pirates who deliberately stopped paying a subscription in favor of consuming content for free.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that corporations have some unalienable right to take our money; what I'm saying is that with the recent increase in digital piracy, it's not unthinkable that it has had some, however small, financial impact on their bottom line.
I feel this is a very nuanced take and genuinely don't understand how this community has taken offense to it.
There is a third party that cares: those of us who pay subscriptions that finance the content that pirates steal. Due in part to rising rates of piracy, our subscription fees go up and/or production budgets go down. In turn, pirates should care, too, because then there's less in quantity and quality to steal.
How is the owner not deprived of your copy? Have you given it back to them? It's an odd thing to mince over words like "theft" and "stealing." If it's the words that bother you, perhaps consider this: should it be permissible to consume a digital good without consent of the copyright holder?
If the copyright holder wants more exposure, that is up to them to decide. It's absolutely unreasonable to do so on their behalf and claim it's somehow doing them a favor. With that logic, any form of theft can be legitimized.
Copyright doesn't explicitly say anything about distribution. Distribution is usually used to determine the scale of the crime and calculating incurred damages.
What is exactly "information" in this statement? Is a feature length movie "information" that needs to be shared freely? At 4K freely or will HD suffice for the meaning? Or is it just a plot summary? I'm in the camp that will argue just the latter.
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.
Making a copy without the copyright is against the law, no matter which way you slice it. Egregious large-scale infringement is usually prosecuted, whereas it's otherwise settled civilly. Nevertheless, both constitute copyright infringement.
Indeed I had the terms confused: it's incorrect to say fiat currency has intrinsic value; it has instrumental value.
I don't think it's reasonable to expect every commercial product to find profitability through exposure. I can attest to this first hand as I had published an open source Android game that was republished without ads. This led me to ultimately make the repository private, because I could not find a way to remain profitable while offering the source code and bearing the costs of labor and various cloud services.
On the flip side I guess I can take credit for the millions of installs from the other app… except they didn't publicly acknowledge me.
Without details of the hypothetical scenario made here, we cannot know if that's the case. If the ticket purchaser was unable to see the circus because their flight home was delayed, the circus has no obligation to refund them. If attendance of "Circus 2" is offered to the purchaser due to the cancellation of "Circus 1" under the conditions of the original ticket purchase, then it's unlikely to be an unfair contact.
There are all kinds of details missing here that we can freely speculate about.
No, I don't get it.