You came across as super patronizing so I responded the same. It’s not that big of a thing man, chill out.

You can eat and not pay attention with a manual transmission, I don’t know why we’d pretend you can’t. If you’re just on the highway cruising both are just going to be in one gear all the time.

I never claimed you couldn’t eat and drive a manual. I said that people who claim autos are better because they make it easier to choose to drive distracted (alternative phrasing - who choose to drive like a reckless asshole) shouldn’t be on the road.

Either way, the problem is that people have to drive even if they don’t want to engage. The popularity of automatic transmissions proves that (to most Americans at least) cars are an appliance and something people do because they have to. Fuck cars.

Well, yeah, that’s always been the case. There are some enthusiasts sure, but for the most part a car is seen as a more convenient bus. But people riding the bus seldom choose to behave dangerously while commuting, there’s something about the mentality of these people (choosing to drive distracted) that is at odds with normal, acceptable behavior

You don’t need to assure me of the blatantly obvious. My point wasn’t that you can’t eat and drive manual at the same time, it was that all these people claim automatic is a better transmission on the basis it facilitates their choice to drive distracted shouldn’t be on the road. I didn’t see a single person saying “oh I like driving manual better because it makes it easier for me to be an irresponsible road user”.

All of these people responding that they prefer auto so they can eat or otherwise not pay attention in the car are the best (only?) argument for why everyone should drive manual.

Whatever your transmission preference is, if you’re not engaged in driving you shouldn’t be on the road!

It’s nice to be able to open up an old computer to add more RAM/Storage/etc., but also get that making everything integrated and soldered improves durability and reliability.

If you’re willing to believe that soldering in a hard drive has anything at all to do with reliability I don’t even know what to tell you. The fact they apple will, with a straight face, charge $300+ to upgrade from 256gb of ssd capacity to 512gb should also be a clue…you can get 1tb for that price. and that price gauging on selling the customer parts at over 100% markup is the sole reason they solder them in.

No, I didn’t mischaracterize your points (other than the deliberate example where I demonstrated what a straw man looks like). But hey, nothing you’ve said stands up to scrutiny so good on you for stubbornly arguing nonsense for so long despite an obvious inability to engage in any of the points I’ve made along with a comprehensive failure to understand the terms of argument itself. I hope you don’t vote.

It’s not a claim I’ve made. If you haven’t paid for something you’ve used or ingested, you deprived the creator of income.

That is a claim. You have made it in this post, ergo it is a claim you have made.

That’s a fact. And the argument about profits is a straw man because that’s not the same thing. People who ingest media talk about it and that convinces others to ingest it. Whether people who pirate content talk about it is irrelevant to the fact that they stole income from the creator to watch it in the first place.

You’re claiming it to be a fact, that doesn’t make it so lmfao. Piracy of things that are unavailable for sale robs creators of what income, exactly? “Piracy” including circumventing DRM, including for legitimate license holders, again, what loss income? Y’know it’s cheaper to fly from Melbourne to LA and buy adobe creative suite than it is to purchase it in australia, unfortunately evading geoblocking is considered piracy. Those immoral Australian deviants have no right to circumvent the noble price gauging of multinationals apparently.

There is no fact here. There is a baseless claim that, again, I’d ask you to substantiate. What’s this, like my fourth post in a row where I’ve invited you do to do so. Perhaps a fifth response where you fail to do that will convince someone.

And for your reference, confidently claiming something does not make it a fact. There needs to be actual truth to it as well, if you cannot demonstrate the truth of a claim then nobody is obligated to accept it as fact.

Secondly, no one is arguing that it’s immoral because it’s illegal. That’s also a straw man. I’m arguing it’s immoral because you’re entitling yourself to the fruits of someone’s labor and creativity without holding up your end of the social contract.

We established several posts ago that pirated products are typically more profitable. Your (often false) assumption that pirates haven’t purchased the rights to the content they are pirating and incomplete ideas of what piracy includes is failing you here. If there is no opportunity to pay for said content, is it still immoral?

You appeal to holding up the social contract, what about cases of actual theft where legitimate customers are cut off from access by developers and via pirate to have access to content they have legally paid for? How much extra money should should someone owe universal studios if they want to rip a DVD or download a rip to their laptop so they can watch it on a flight? When kids used to record songs off the radio onto a cassette tape, how much money do they owe the record labels for doing so?

Which there is no evidence of ever happening

Bullshit. The entire premise of piracy is ingesting something you didn’t pay for. There is literally a 100% correlation of evidence because, otherwise, piracy wouldn’t be an idea.

Your definition of piracy is inadequate, but even in those cases where piracy meets your definition, you cannot provide any actual substantiated cost for what creators have lost, because no such evidence exists. There is no evidence to support the assumption that a pirated piece of content is a lost sale (there is, however, evidence that leads to the likelihood of pirated content leading to more sales, be it by word of mouth marketing increasing the products sales or by future/parallel sales by the pirate themselves).

If it’s bullshit, link a study and prove me wrong.

And I don’t know what a straw man is? You’re literally arguing against a point that I’ve never made. I have pirated content. I’m not claiming any high ground here. I just wish people would stop pretending like piracy isn’t theft when it is. You’re stealing income from a creator who is charging for their content. They’re not giving it away for free. You taking it without paying is depriving them of income and entitling you to get something that you didn’t trade in good faith.

Lmfao I made a point that equating piracy to theft is as wrong as equating murder to speeding and you claimed that was a straw man because nobody is arguing speeding is murder. No shit genius, the point of that comparison is to demonstrate the absurdity of the former claim, because nobody is so clueless as to make the latter.

For your education benefit, a stawman would be an argument derailing the topic of conversation with an entirely different claim (not by drawing a legitimate comparison). Here’s an example, it’s subtly different so try to see if you can’t spot how it’s not the same as the argument above.

Defending the big corporations and the establishment means you’re supporting scumbags who benefit from it like Harvey weinersien and the sexists at activision/blizzard. You are directly supporting abusers of women

You’re so confidently asserting nonsense and making both stupid and irrelevant claims. If you want to lick boots and swallow corporate propaganda equating serious crimes with misdemeanors that’s your choice, but you’d have to be beyond stupid to expect that sentiment to be shared and a left leaning, somewhat anti corporate message board.

The issue isn’t whether the action is depriving the owner of the item. The issue is whether the author of the content is deprived of something, in this case income, when someone pirates that content

That’s a claim you’ve made. Prove it. The evidence shows that more more pirated content has higher profits. If you can’t quantify that (even if only at a macro level), then it’s a worthless claim.

Arguing that piracy and theft are different is just a semantic debate like saying that “murder” and “crime” are 2 different things because not all crimes result in someone being dead.

That’s the whole point. Not all crimes are equal, not all crimes are even immoral. Arguing it’s wrong because it’s illegal or right because it isn’t is a monstrously flawed position to take.

…We’re only discussing the morality of depriving an author of income, …

Which there’s no evidence of ever happening. You’ve presented no case for why piracy is immoral

No one compared murder to theft in any way to suggest that they are the same action.

Obviously you don’t understand what a straw man is. That was supporting the previously raised point not not all crimes are equal by pointing out a comparable case that everyone agrees with. Theft, like murder, has definition, both in common language and legally. Neither of those are piracy. The claim that piracy is theft is purely corporate propaganda hammered into the population with this dipshit ads from the 2000s. The fact that you’ve so entirely bought into speaks volumes to your ability to think critically.

No. I am not comparing to wage theft

Then I’ll try a third time. My claim is that theft deprived the owner of their item. Piracy does not do this, ergo it is something different than theft.

My second argument is to preempt the inevitable “pure economic loss” claim. It’s a tangent, and is not a claim that 100% piracy is sustainable, simply that the assertion that piracy causes commercial products to fail (as piracy exists today) is factually and demonstrably wrong.

My third point, which you again chose not to address, is that equating piracy to theft is as stupid as comparing speeding to murder. They are different crimes and should be treated as such. You know what an actual comparison to theft is, which is the whole basis of the OP? A product a user has paid for being removed by the publisher because they chose to incorporate drm that is no longer sustainable, wonder why nobody calls this theft (in fact it is closer to theft than piracy). Oh wait no I don’t, I spelled it out in the first post - piracy = theft is propaganda to hurt the little guy, the big players are manipulating the system such that they are above the same laws we play by.

Be fine with piracy or don’t, I couldn’t give a shit either way. That is irrelevant to the points I’ve raised.

That’s a dishonest argument. You are stealing. It’s just not the media that you’re stealing. You’re stealing income from the creator.

I don’t agree. I think your trying to compare this to wage theft, wherin an employee is promised or legally guaranteed some income based on hours work, where after both parties have agreed to this the employee has performed the work and the employer is withholding some of the pay. This case is stealing - the trade was completed and the employer is in possession of an asset (eg the pay that they are entitled to) - this is not a physical thing, but it is a real thing, with real physical value, and in removing that the employer would stealing that asset. Obviously there’s a garguntuam difference here because both parties had agreed to exchange assets and the employer has taken ownership of that pay per the agreement. If someone decided to do that same work, absent agreement, obviously they can’t claim wage theft because they didn’t have any entitlement.

To be intellectually honest, you’d compare piracy to plagiarism. But that’s (correctly) not as alarming as stealing which is why we need to mislead people to make it seem worse.

Imagine there’s an amusement park ride that you want to go on. If you find a way to sneak onto the ride, are you “stealing” the ride? You’re not stealing the physical ride but you’re entitling yourself to the experience without paying the person who has to create, run, maintain, and sell that experience.

Entering without permission (in your example, paying) is trespassing. It’s fine argument to say that it’s morally wrong and that you shouldn’t do it. It’s blatantly wrong to claim it is stealing.

Digital content is the same way. You’re justifying it because, in today’s day and age, most content is provided by giant corporations and financial assholes but don’t pretend that you’re not harming the creators of said work and potentially keeping them from making a living. If we lived in a perfect world where everyone was honest, we would have all this content be free and people would pay for it if they enjoyed it and wanted more of it and they’d just refuse to pay for things they thought were shit. This insistence that you’re not stealing because you’re not stealing the vehicle of entertainment is stupid and dishonest, though.

Digital content is the same way, insofar as piracy is more akin to trespassing than theft. It’s an abstract argument to say not buying something is harming owners or creators, who are you (or anyone else) to dictate what people buy, or to attach some morality to that?

You say it harms creators, but the evidence says that pirated games make more money. I imagine your claim is based on an assumption that people who pirate stuff do so at the expense of people buying it. Have you bothered to explore that assumption any further? You might be surprised.

Just admit you’re stealing and leave it at that. Attempting to justify the morality of it (or whatever you’re attempting to do here) just makes you look silly. You’re taking the “benefit” of the content without reciprocating.

Piracy is quite literally not stealing. Stealing is an act of removing something from another’s possession, into your own. That is simply not what piracy is, and trying to falsey equate different crimes is every but as absurd as “stop pretending driving 5mphover the limit isn’t murder, it’s wrong and trying to justify the morality of it makes you look silly”

That’s a fine argument that they might have, but piracy still isn’t stealing. If someone steals something from me, I am deprived of that thing. If someone copies my intellectual property, I am hypothetically impacted by loss of income, but I can still use that information.

They can say it’s morally wrong for someone to use or copy information against the owners wishes or without paying. They are welcome to that argument. None of us are obligated to care about their opinion.

If they can claim customers don’t own something, especially physical items, after purchase because they are being pedantic over how people interact with intellectual property, we can and should absolutely use the same distinction to distance piracy fromt theft.