It’s a tool that has the stated purpose of violating copyright and essentially stealing. Even though you could use it for legal purposes, their website specifically says “watch TV shows...”
If the creator isn’t getting paid for you to watch, then it’s theft. Doesn’t matter if it’s stealing bits, or stealing gold. It’s theft. Rationalize all you want, but if the owner of the content is having their content used against their will, then you are violating their rights.
If the code were an ATM pin code cracker, would that be any different? After all, money is just data right? Just bits stored at the bank.
Let’s also stop conflating “open source” with “right to steal.” Completely different things. If you download a pirate movie, that’s theft — it weakens the concept of open source when it gets lumped into the movement for “free” content.
It’s ironic that a lot of open source people love to talk about licenses — while desiring enforcement of those licenses while at the same time arguing that the license to use someone else’s work is fair to violate.
>If the creator isn’t getting paid for you to watch, then it’s theft.
Except that bits and bars of gold are nothing alike which is why you can't be convicted of theft for copying bits. Given that there is literally no relation in law nor morality between theft and copyright infringement even if you believe copyright is effective and desirable tool you could skip a lot of misunderstanding by skipping the part where you use a bad analogy to muddy the water.
> Every illegal download reduces the size of the legal purchase marketplace.
Source? Why wouldn't it be possible for every illegal download to increase the size of the legal purchase marketplace? Or to have it effectively stay the same for that matter?
The effects are complicated and hard to measure, but in the Napster era some bands did find that piracy helped their sales. For small bands it definitely can help with promotion. Then there were megabands like Radiohead that put out free albums and cashed in on the publicity via ticket and merch sales.
The back catalog stuff (Rolling Stones etc) probably suffers although IMHO the copyright on this stuff should be much shorter anyway.
By that logic, I should be able to illegally download a movie, immediately delete it from my hard drive and then repeat this process as many times as I want to continuously shrink the size of the legal purchase market from my bedroom until it is zero.
If the cracker were being marketed by their creators as “the easiest way to steal money” would it be any different? Intent does matter. In fact for a crime to have been committed one has to prove intent. If the intent is to facilitate the robbing of banks, that’s different than “pen-testing” as a means to help/protect.
The problem with that statement is that in the eyes of the media consumer, nothing was stolen because it was duplicated and thus nobody 'lost' anything. With money, that wouldn't be the case because it can only exist in one place at a time. Media, however, is not taken from one place and put in another place, but is copied.
On the other hand, the 'stealing' isn't as much the media, as it is the 'consuming' of it. I'm not sure what the correct terminology is, but a lot of people don't think of it as accessing information that isn't public and has a price to access it (be it books, movies, games), but the lawyers (and probably the 'legal owners') do look at it that way. Of course a lot of PR happens during wording and publication and it's much easier to say 'this bad person stole this movie' instead of 'this person gained access and consumed this information while not being allowed to do that'.
"If the creator isn’t getting paid for you to watch, then it’s theft"
Nonsense. In some cases it might be copyright infringement, but only a court can decide and only on a case-by-case basis. How else do we determine if a reproduction is fair use?
"if the owner of the content is having their content used against their will, then you are violating their rights."
That is not how copyrights work. Criticism and parody are allowed whether or not the copyright holder agrees to it, as are various forms of sampling to create new works. Again, whether or not a given act is infringing is something a court has to decide.
I think that's a valid position, but it doesn't justify misusing a legal instrument. Abuse of the legal system, and of the DMCA in particular, is worse than a few kids watching some movies without paying.
If the creator isn’t getting paid for you to watch, then it’s theft. Doesn’t matter if it’s stealing bits, or stealing gold. It’s theft. Rationalize all you want, but if the owner of the content is having their content used against their will, then you are violating their rights.
If the code were an ATM pin code cracker, would that be any different? After all, money is just data right? Just bits stored at the bank.
Let’s also stop conflating “open source” with “right to steal.” Completely different things. If you download a pirate movie, that’s theft — it weakens the concept of open source when it gets lumped into the movement for “free” content.
It’s ironic that a lot of open source people love to talk about licenses — while desiring enforcement of those licenses while at the same time arguing that the license to use someone else’s work is fair to violate.