This is popular, but extremely misinformed, so perhaps explaining this will be profitable to more people. You don't actually "buy" a use license agreement. These licensing agreements stipulate a set of restrictions attached to the items you do buy as a condition for their sale. https://twitter.com/Larslarsonsons1/status/1246469586465230850

If violating a use license agreement, a kind of contract, was legally theft, *you would not need copyright law in addition to the civil and criminal statutes prohibiting and awarding damages for theft*. It would be redundant. Unauthorised reproduction would be prosecuted as theft

It's also ethically irrelevant. You can slap a licensing agreement on anything you can sell including, and this has actually happened, physical seeds. A farmer growing a second generation of plants from seeds he bought is obviously not morally equivalent to someone stealing seeds

But he does violate said agreement if the company selling them attached it to the sale. This does not mean he doesn't own his seeds, which is why they had to invent a whole separate legal framework to give him grief about using his seeds prudently and undercuting their profits.

The sale of the object has already been completed, with the ownership transfered to the buyer, at the time when said buyer first gets a chance to violate the attached use license agreement. That's why, if I do steal a game you bought, you will be the one suing me, not the company

It's also factually irrelevant with theft. The facts of a case of theft entail breaking into foreign possession to remove an item (with the intent of appropriation). Violating a use license agreement entails processing in unlicensed ways things already owned and possessed by you.

Of course, whether we think that our use of acquired objects we do physically possess and legally own can rightfully be subject to this sort of restriction to these ends is open and has been widely debated ever since patents were first conceived.

But the point I'm making is that "piracy is theft" is the most asinine, self-serving rhetorical ploy. Right now, under the presently existing framework of intellectual property law, it's not *actually* theft.

There are ways to argue against unauthorised reproduction and distribution, but this is literally twisting yourself into a tiny pretzel for comfort and convenience (viz an absurdity)

For example you can argue: we should sustain profits in these markets. To sustain profits, we must sustain prices. To sustain prices we must sustain scarcity. Networks of cooperative resource-pooling threaten us with abundance, therefore they must be banned.

That's what's at stake here, and it does create actual frictions, because many people actually do currently depend on these markets for income at a time when technological developments permit vast swaths of people to transcend them.

My personal opinion is that the enemy here is not the new technologies, it is not the people creating and participating in structures of free cooperation (no amount of smears will change that this is what they are), it's not the radical inclusion, and it's not the abundance.

The solution to a system that penalises some people for universal abundance -and I expect any sensible person off the street to be able to concede this- is not actually to ban the abundance by propping up artificial monopolies until markets in that area work again.

It's the structures of market exchange that are blatantly failing to support these people in light of plainly positive developments, so, since these are here to stay, the solution is not to go dystopian, it's to make alternative structures of support that can complement them

Not only is it immoral -and manifestly reactionary- to shift the blame on the people sharing things with each other with pathetic excuses that people may deserve to survive, I guess, but not to watch movies, or listen to music (a privilege for the better off, such leftism)

It's also an infantile, impotent response to developments that *can not* be rolled back. It's shouting at history to stand still. Massive established interests are trying to suppress this with the full power of the state, literally by carceral means, and *they're failing*.

So moralizing against networks of free distribution is, in fact, akin to a neurotic tantrum. There *is* sensible concern and sentiment behind it, but it literally can not help anyone. We need to get over the idea of just deserts right now, or everyone will suffer.

Because, I guess, there is one party helped by this framing. As long as you spend your energy complaining about sharing networks, you divert attention away from a) the scandalous distribution of existing revenues (which has literally been in the decimal points for centuries)

and b) from the need to secure sufficient non-market income or structures of mutual aid for people right now. Instead you're promoting exactly the most favourable solution for the employers (and usual holders of the copyright), profits sustained through increasing state coercion.

If you don't understand this right now, and place your bets on royalties, the outcome won't be creators living by their work. It will be companies using the state to ensure monetized platforms are competitive with these networks, while keeping the distribution in their favour.

The idea that the little guy can somehow embed themselves in structures not meant to support him and acquire property and comfort by hard work and striving is literally the oldest form of propaganda, and buying it always ends the same way, with dashed dreams and disillusionment.

You can buy the dream of a dignified life through hard work, but realizing it is prohibited by the product use license agreement. That is all.