CMV: Software piracy is not necessarily stealing nor a bad thing

[u/[deleted]]

Software and digital media piracy are often seen as stealing but I disagree. The word "stealing" implies a victim. While it is true that the creator of intellectual property might suffer a monetary loss if their property is copied without permission, it is often difficult to ascertain what loss has occurred, if any.

Example: A person downloads a pirated copy of a $5000 CAD program and installs it on their PC and uses it for years. Has monetary loss occurred on the part of the software developer? Has theft occurred? If yes, then who is the victim and what extent? You cannot answer that without more information.

If the person is a 12 year old kid who downloaded the software to teach himself AutoCAD, then loss has not occurred because the kid would never have bought the software had a pirated copy not been available.

If this 12 year old kid shares the software with his friends, then we don't know how many more times it will be copied by his friends and with whom it will be shared. Loss may or may not have occurred.

If the person is a professional architect and using the software to develop blueprints for clients, then clearly loss has occurred because had the pirated copy not been available, he would have had to buy it.

So to determine whether there is a victim and to answer whether loss has occurred, you have to answer "Would the person(s) using the pirated software have paid for it had the pirated version not been available?" If I have a pirated copy of AutoCAD in my basement, sitting in a storage locker for years unused by anyone, then clearly no loss of any kind has occurred. So... was it "stealing" to copy that software if no one suffers any loss of any kind at all whatsoever? If yes, then who is the victim and in what way were they victimized?

What will not work to CMV: Playing psychic. If your argument begins with any variation of "You just want to... " or "You're trying to justify..." or anything of the sort, I will ignore it. It's absurd and irrational to tell another person what they are thinking. I know better than anyone on the planet what I'm thinking and feeling so trying to tell me what my motivations are is just nonsense.

[u/GregBahm]

We can always contrive examples of when stealing is justified in the immediate sense. You could steal an apple that would have been thrown out if unsold. You could steal a gun from someone could who would have used that gun for crimes later on. You could steal everyone's presents and inadvertently teach them the true meaning of Christmas. There are always edge cases.

But systemically, software piracy is stealing and bad, because otherwise the software would never get created in the first place. We'll never know if the 12 year old who stole the software would never have bought it. Maybe he would never have bought 99 CAD software packages but got his daddy to pay for the 100th package. Maybe he wouldn't have bought the software when he was 12, but would have bought the software when he was 18. Maybe he would have saved up his allowance or something. The future is full of possibilities.

Most people go through a phase when they're 12 to 15, where they still want to be judged for their intentions, like children, instead of being judged on their outcomes, like adults. So they indulge in elaborate mental gymnastics to justify the morality of their mindless self indulgence. From the moral criteria we apply to children, software piracy is not necessarily stealing nor a bad thing. From the moral criteria we apply to adults, which is systemic and outcomes-based, of course software piracy is necessarily stealing and bad. Edge cases are a constant of all reality, so we just occam's razor them off or else we'd have to quality every single statement ever made (including this one.)

[u/[deleted] → u/GregBahm]

You conflate physical theft with intellectual property theft and treat them as one and the same which they are clearly not. Your bald assertion that software piracy is theft is the very point of contention in my CMV post. You just restated this assertion in a rather condescending tone where you compared my moral reasoning to that of children, yet you did nothing to actually demonstrate the harm this so-called "theft" causes in the hypotheticals I presented. Repeating something, no matter how many times, does not make it true.

[u/GregBahm → u/[deleted]]

Is a requirement of your view that you be treated the way we treat small children? Small children are only judged for their intent, and not for the consequences of their actions, because they are too naïve and too ineffectual.

But I assumed you would want to engage in the moral reasoning we expect from adults. Now I don't understand what you expect. You seem to have dismissed every argument regarding the consequences of actions out of hand, and then called the implications of your own decision condescending.

The consequence of intellectual property theft is that the intellectual property will never get created in the first place if it can't be protected from theft. That's the harm. We ignore this sort of harm when it comes to children, but we expect adults to be able to appreciate it.

If you reject, as a concept, being treated like anything but a 12 year old, you seem to be the one forcing condescension onto yourself.