People keep doing this, so I don't see that it hurts to explain why, how, and what to do instead. Maybe this will click with someone who was about to make this mistake.
I don't know what to tell you - I don't want to brag about my eyesight, but it's pretty good - No matter what angle, no matter what phone, the crease is visible. What would I have to gain lying about this? I could say the same thing - Stop trying to copium your purchase?
If your phone screen became a 75hz e-ink display I'm pretty sure that would actually drain your battery faster than currently, which I assume is once per day. Would you accept that compromise of going from weeks to <1 day?
Just an anecdote, but my phone ran out of battery most often when a full charge lasted almost two days. It made me lazy about charging at night. Now I have a wireless charger next to my work computer and in my car, I probably don't need to charge at night any more. Granted, I'd prefer a large battery when I'm traveling, but battery size is less important to me recently.
I do, it's called embracing the future - Either get with it or get out of the game. If you aren't giving your AI untethered sudo access then honestly its more of a reflection on you and your inability to accept change in the workplace.
we already have - every time you get in a car you're elevating the chance of death considerably from before you hopped in. (seriously it's like 1000000x more dangerous than just sitting on a sofa)
Granted it's a low chance, but it's also similarly low that your bank account will be drained to zero because you codex --yolo'd it. If that DOES happen to someone then yeah, I'd consider changing my behavior.
For example there's no fucking way I would FSD in a Tesla.
I can imagine the same conversation 10 years later: "The productivity boost of AI implants is obvious by now, it gives at least +50 IQ points. Those stubborn employees should just yield and grant full control to their brains if they want to stay relevant."
It's even worse: it's a sign of insecurity and the lack of the ability to just trust and let go of control. Often related to malignant narcissism. I recommend SSRIs and inpatient therapy. You should probably give up custody of your children, too, unless you want them to grow up with the same weaknesses.
Everyone should give up custody of their children to the state. Refusal to give your children to the state is a sign of insecurity and the lack of the ability to just trust and let go of control.
You should really just give up all of your freedom. Refusal to give up your freedom is a sign of insecurity and the lack of the ability to just trust and let go of control.
Ha, this is the guy that got absolutely butchered in his Reddit post [1] about the same link. OP has extensive history in the piracy subreddits and believes piracy is not theft.
I dunno, I’d assume it is projecting your own inability to separate analysis of basic definitions and facts (the question of “in law, are any or all of copyright infringement, piracy, and theft literally the same things?”) from personal political preference (“is rigid adherence to the wishes of the copyright owner desirable for commercially licensed music? is rigid adherence to the wishes of the copyright owner desirable when that is adherence to the terms of a copyleft free software license preferred by the FSF?”) combined with you being really bad at guessing other people’s political opinions (“is dragonwriter a zealous proponent of the FSF in particular or copyleft licenses in general?”) even in a forum where those opinions are on full display?
That's a very apples and oranges comparison and betrays a lack of even the most rudimentary critical thinking skills. Either that or just playground bullying.
The GPL protections don’t exist without copyright law. Why are you so willing to dismiss other creators right to control how their content gets created and think the people who choose to create content and license their software under the GPL should be respected.
> The GPL protections don’t exist without copyright law.
The GPL is a hack leveraging copyright law against itself, speciically, it seeks to achieve two things:
(1) The legal freedom that would exist in the absence of copyright law, and
(2) Source disclosure of modifications, on terms that preserve point (1).
Without copyright law, (1) is unnecessary, but people with concerns like those that motivate the FSF would probably look for a different mechanism to encourage source disclosure.
> Why are you so willing to dismiss other creators right to control how their content gets created and think the people who choose to create content and license their software under the GPL should be respected.
First, how is pointing out the fact that copyright infringement is neither, in the literal sense, either piracy or theft, and that those are metaphors used for their emotional impact, dismissing anyone’s right to do anything?
Second, while I respect the FSF’s basic goals with copyleft licensing, I’d much prefer copyrights with a shorter default term (perhaps extendable with a fee, but even then I’d prefer the terms of the extension beyond a short default term made it possible to buy the work into the public domain at a set price that was also the basis for the fee for maintaining the copyright), narrower subject matter coverage, and broader fair use limits, even though that would limit the utility of the GPL as a wedge to encourage source disclosure on Free terms. I don’t think people using the GPL deserve any better treatment under copyright law than people releasing content that isn't under a Free license, I think the current structure of copyright law is an excessive restriction on human liberty that does not serve the public good.
You don’t have the “liberty” to decide what other people create. You are free to use your time, money and effort to produce something that you want to give away.
Piracy is a real crime, I like to define it as theft of goods in transit. however it might be more specifically be the above in international free zones.
I always find it funny how people want to try and inflate one of the lesser crimes "copyright infringement" into one of the most heinous ones. Might as well call it software rape, it's just as accurate.
But the definition of theft is that it permanently deprives the owner of the object being thieved. Piracy might be a real crime but it doesn't match the definition of theft.
I'm not even sure what software rape is supposed to mean, but to me that seems to belittle the very real crime of rape.
To the letter of the law or contextual text, you may be super right.
Still does not solve the issue of artists that are getting ripped off left and right.
Do you pay every busker you pass by? Or do you block your ears when you pass to ensure you don't "steal" the music?
I think a combination of UBI, abolishment of copyright and a busking model with 100% of the proceeds going directly to artists would improve things no end. We have the technology to do this and have no need for leeches like Spotify.
Stealing:
the action or offence of taking another person's property without permission or legal right and without intending to return it; theft.
---
Regardless if there is anything physical missing, you're still obtaining something for which you don't have the ownership rights, therefore another persons property.
And somewhere there's a starving artist that would get $0.25 per purchase that now gets nothing, so you could argue that you're stealing from the artist.
Maybe by definition, but if you're a game developer and you find out everybody is pirating your game and not purchasing it from Steam/physical store, it's akin to them walking into the store, sliding the product under their jacket and walking out. You're not going to say "They are infringing on my copyright".
The idea that every illegitimate copy is a lost sale is old and tired. Most people wouldn't mind enjoying plenty of entertainment products that would otherwise never pay for (regardless of whether a free alternative exists or not).
Since you talk about game developers, just today was "Hollow Knight: Silksong" released, a game with no DRM (which means it will be on every pirate site the minute it releases, something that was known beforehand), and had just a few hours later over half a million concurrent players on Steam, one of the many storefronts where the game is available.
No industry has ever been killed by piracy, not even close, and the cases of musicians, authors, and game developers who have attributed piracy to their success keeps piling up. I really don't get why people who in other aspects of life try to look at the facts of things keep arguing so fervently about something proven to be, at best, a net positive and, at worst, a way for more people to enjoy arts and entertainment that they would never had otherwise.
If you don't get money for your works, you might be unlucky, or you might just not be good enough to make what people want [to pay for]. As a game developer myself, that's certainly my case. I hope to one day make something so many people care about, that they go out of their way to pirate it, because statistically that means I'd sell a lot of copies.
Sure, 100% of piracy wouldn't translate to sales but from my own perspective - I pirate. A lot. Hypocritcal for arguing about this? Yes definitely. But if there is a movie I really wanted to see, such as Tom Cruise's last Mission Impossible entry, and the concept of downloading a movie for free didn't exist - I would pay for it (Whether it be a cinema screening, a digital purchase, DVD, or specific streaming service). Otherwise I could never see it [Maybe on Free TV at some down the line?]. However, I do know that we live in an age where every bit of media can be stolen so I am less likely to pay, and know at some point after threatrical release it will be available online. And I was right. I kept my $20 and enjoyed the movie.
And I'm not arguing it's killing the industry. Shoplifting exists today but brick and mortar isn't dead (Well, it is dying but that's because of online shopping). But stores would see a little less profit due to shop lifting. Very similar to piracy.
It is stealing, and using an out dated definition to try and paint it as anything else is a wild take.
I hope you do make it as a developer one day, and create a hit game, and you have some telemetry showing 10000 people playing and check your Sales to see 200 copies sold and you tell me if you think you haven't been robbed.
> akin to them walking into the store, sliding the product under their jacket and walking out
That is a misrepresentation of what is happening across computers and networks. Here is a better analogue:
If someone walks up to my car, taps it with a magic wand, mutters some incantations, waits a few minutes as a perfect duplicate slowly materializes, and then drives away in the duplicate... Of what have I been deprived? Maybe privacy, depending on what I had in the car at the time it was duplicated... But that's tangential to the point here.
There's a worthy argument that the above scenario is still a wrong (some kind of tort, maybe). But there is simply no argument that the above scenario is equivalent to theft.
Theft deprives someone of a scarce material resource. Copyright infringement subverts someone's exclusive, government-granted monopoly. Unlike being secure in one's possessions, copyright has never been understood as a natural right. People grok this distinction intuitively, even if they neither fully understand the technology nor possess the words to articulate it well.
If a corporation walks up to you, taps you with a magic wand, mutters some incantations, waits a few minutes as a perfect duplicate of you slowly materializes, then walks away with the duplicate, would you consider it theft or copyright infringement?
You would argue they are depriving you of a scarce material resource: your knowledge and experience that make you a valuable, esteemed professional. The corporation would argue that nobody is removing your copy of knowledge and experience, and they would not have hired you in the first place anyway.
I would? Are you sure? Please don't put words in my mouth.
Is your hypothetical an invasion of privacy? Yes.
Is it enslavement of the duplicate? Very probably, yes. You don't specify what the corporation will do next, but I don't see how they'll avoid it.
Is it theft of my knowledge and experience? No. I'm not deprived of them, and would still have them after.
Is it copyright infringment? Possibly, but not necessarily of "my" copyright. I remember plenty of copyrighted music and can hum it on a whim. Presumably the duplicate could do so also, so that music has been copied, along with rest of me.
You've made a rather wild jump from the inanimate to the sentient and from deprivation of specific property to deprivation of natural rights. And you've genuinely lost me with what this hypothetical is even supposed to prove.
Again, it's possible for things to not be theft and also still be wrong for other reasons. Theft is a specific wrong. Words have distinct meanings.
Theft is taking possessions away from someone else, and as a result depriving the victim of that property. The legal threshold would also include an intent to deprive (mens rea) in most countries.
Copyright infringement is making a copy of something for purposes beyond fair use when the government has declared it the exclusive right of someone else to make such copies. The legal threshold would also include evidence of harm.
The jump from a digital file to a physical car is specifically to demonstrate that these things are not equivalent. Copying a file does not deprive someone of that file. To make the physical world work similarly to the digital, we have to add magic that violates conservation of energy and duplicate a car at effectively zero marginal cost. To make the digital world work similarly to the physical, we would have to end general purpose computing and lock down all computers such that files can only exist in one place and can only be moved, not copied. Both transformations in an attempt to achieve equivalence are obviously absurd. That's the point.
These things (theft and copyright infringement) are both wrongs, but they are strongly distinct wrongs.
The jump from inanimate things (files and cars) to sentient life (human duplicates) in your example is still unclear to me. It looked to me like you were assuming I would think of it as theft if a corporation made a duplicate of me. So I gave several reasons other than theft for me, or anyone, to think of that as wrong. What are you trying to demonstrate, given that I still don't think your example would be theft and have other reasons---those deprivations of rights---to think of it as wrong?
> I was steelmanning your argument.
No, because what you brought up was not my argument.
Steelmanning, when the counterparty is present, involves restating someone's argument until they agree, "yes, that's a fair summary of my argument," and then critiquing that.
You are strawmanning, not steelmanning: inventing a new example that the counterparty did not reference, which is substantively different from the argument actually made, and then critiquing that.
These apologetics for piracy are ancient and weren't good decades ago, let alone now. Yes, digital data has no scarcity. But that doesn't mean it's a victimless crime to just take it. Someone worked hard on making that music (or game, or whatever), with society giving them the chance to turn a profit by selling copies to people. When you just take it without paying (thus violating the social contract), you are in a very real sense stealing that person's time. So while it might not be the case that a digital copy taken does not cause the original to go missing, piracy is very much theft in the moral sense. And that is why people get upset about it.
Megacorporate propaganda conflating copyright infringement with violent raiders on the high seas is both decades old and completely ridiculous.
> But that doesn't mean it's a victimless crime to just take it.
Please reply to what I wrote, not what you imagine I implied. Nowhere have I suggested copyright infringement is victimless. I have suggested it is more like a tort than a crime, but civil wrongs are wrongs against someone (i.e. a victim).
> When you just take it without paying (thus violating the social contract), you are in a very real sense stealing that person's time.
Please don't twist and abuse language in lieu of a sound argument. Stealing a person's time is already a specific thing: wage theft. It doesn't involve a nebulous social contract; it involves an actual contract between employer and employee for scarce time.
> So while it might not be the case that a digital copy taken does not cause the original to go missing, [copyright infringement] is very much theft in the moral sense. And that is why people get upset about it.
People aren't entitled to whatever returns they fantasize about for a given business model. If technology obsoletes a competitive strategy, we all have to live in that new world. People are understandably upset, and understandably refer to a wrong (theft) that is familiar, sympathetic, and yet factually not the case.
Copyright infringement need not be understood as theft to be understood as wrong. Treating it as theft mischaracterizes the wrong and sets society on a path to criminal enforcement against civil violations, creeping restrictions on general purpose computing, and the growth of the surveillance state.
People who pirate in the year 2025 are almost definitely going to be spending more on music (physical media, merch, tickets, etc) than the average Spotify subscriber. This was true ~20 years ago and given the ease of Spotify and the relative pain of pirating, I would imagine it's even moreso the case today. And even if they spend half a Spotify subscription on music, that's more money going to artists than a Spotify subscription giving them carte blanche access to most music.
The world in which I choose to live (which is seemingly getting further removed from 'shared reality') the meaning of words actually matter. I'm reminded of the classic Calvin & Hobbes strip[0] that ends "Maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding"
"Maybe by definition" does not a counter-argument start.
I read the comments. Despite clearly explaining that he was supporting artists, people just said "no you're lying" and baselessly accused him of piracy.
Anyway OP seems like a great person. And if he did like pirating, cool! You are free to live your life how you see fit :)
Not bot in the traditional sense of the game's AI, but bots as in accounts loaded up with the bare basics to join games and AFK - They level the account, get the steam free drops, and then sell that drop + the account eventually.
There is decent money in it. Back in CSGO I had a VM running two full bot servers at a run cost of ~$3.xx per week to earn ~$30 fully automated.
Everybody complaining of this is admitting they are doing nefarious actions. Those of us playing by the rules see no issue with this - In fact I welcome it!
Sorry if I didn't recognize your sarcasm, but if you’re serious, you’re probably also assuming that rooting is usually done for criminal activity. In fact, both rooting and easy app creation/side-loading are often tools to solve inconveniences. I didn't plan to root my last phone until I encountered some restrictions in the manufacturer’s version of Android that couldn’t be resolved without rooting.
Regarding the topic, I can easily imagine a legitimate app on Google Play with available source code, where you find something inconvenient and your attempts to suggest a fix to the developer did not lead to the desired outcome. Currently, you or your developer friend can simply fork such an app, fix the issue, and release it for the general public without any extra paperwork. This Google policy would make such a developer suspicious/disabled by default (if the developer is not already verified), unless proved otherwise.
Well in my case it is because I'm a highly educated individual who's been in the professional sector for 20 years - I know I'm always right. I do worry it's stroking the ego of those who do NOT deserve it or are NOT actually right
I uploaded my API key to a public repository
I learned not to do this.
Never upload your API key to a public repository.
Ok.