A good time to talk about things that fuck me up about discussions of internet piracy!

‘Piracy’ implies profit is being made which is almost never the case!

‘Stealing’ implies property is being lost which is also not necessarily the case!

When throwing around words like property theft and piracy you are talking about hypothetical loss of a hypothetical profit and that hypothesis is based on the PATENTLY RIDICULOUS premise that all shared files are things that someone would have spent money on had they not been able to obtain it via filesharing!

Never even mind that discussions of e-piracy are often framed in a Western-centric way that disregards the disproportional accessibility of media to all people and which wedges Western capitalist notions of intellectual property where they may not/should not apply!

NOREGRETS.GIF

As I’ve said in the past, calling copyright infringement “stealing” is an emotional appeal disguised as a legal argument.

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