Table of Contents
Then god seperated the state from the church
Secularization
Issues of their times
Jehovah's Witlesses
Christianity
Science
Woman
Overton Window
Malcolm X
We're not burning witches anymore, so we are secular
Misogyny
Incest
Ableism
Pedophilia
Words
Man or Bear?
If Buying isn't Owning, then Pirating isn't Stealing
Pseudointellectualism/
If Buying isn't Owning, then Pirating isn't Stealing
Streaming services were at first heralded by many as the beginning of the end of piracy and copyright infringement. It provided a better service and as such quickly outcompeted the then widespread Kazaa, Napster and Limewire, peer to peer filesharing applications that millions used to get music and other pieces of media for free. In the music industry, this is Spotify, and in the video branche this is Netflix, in the gaming sphere it's Steam1). This was a great deal for both the platforms and the consumers: For just a small, monthly fee users had access to more media content they could ever wish to consume, available anywhere anytime, no large investments required and, best of all, legally! Everyone - except of course the humans actually creating the content (see Spotify) - wins.
However, this honeymoon period lasted only for so long, because these industries would end up becoming really, really competitive. Movies and shows are now spread apart across multiple different vendors/platforms, sometimes even on a per-season basis, subscription fees skyrocket and content is being pulled offline left and right. It turns out that relying on a central corporation to administer your content to you is actually very risky and will see you disappointed more often than not. This is particularly true for content like video games, where recently Ubisoft has pulled The Crew and made it entirely unplayable, or EA who are delisting old games of their F1 video games series. The F1 games released in 2023 and before are products that are virtually indistinguishable from their most recent renditions. Leaving them up for sale would eat into their profits because players would just buy the cheap F1 2020 game instead of the expensive F1 2025 (which offers almost nothing new in comparison apart from new monetization models).
These kinds of things have become pretty widespread phenomena, so much so that the public has become quite irritated by its nature and coined the phrase “If Buying isn't Owning, then Pirating isn't Stealing”. The idea is that if everything is loaned out to you and corporate retains full control over their products and can just decide to revoke your access to their content, then you aren't really buying anything. If the stuff you paid for, sometimes even full price, can just be taken away from you at any time for any reason at the shortest possible notice, then nobody is really owning anything, and what can't be owned can't be stolen either.
Why this is wrong
I… don't like this. This is being dogmatically repeated like mantra at every corner, everyone is throwing that term around like it means anything or is some kind of revelation that we didn't have before. Yes, when you pay for your Netflix subscription then you are buying access to a library, to read the books while you're inside and as long as the library allows you to stay, not to keep any of the books. This is legally watertight and making a copy of the books inside that library is copyright infringement.
Ah, right, just to get it out of the way: Of course it is correct that with digital media you cannot steal a show, you can only make unauthorized copies - you can commit copyright infringement, not theft.
Anyway: Yes, subscription-based monetization has always been bad. Even when Spotify first launched, it was always on the condition that you pay for its subscription until the rest of time, making it some good 120 to 180 bucks per year per person, and you get excluded from their walled garden if ever you get into a situation where you cannot or do not want to pay for it. And yes, subscription-based streaming also means that you get your content only if daddy Netflix decrees that you are worthy. If it decides to pull your favorite show from their library then that's on you for being too stupid by subscribing to them in the first place and thus giving your control over a product away to a corporation, who will certainly not be greedy and fuck you over just for one more penny under their bottom line.
The irony with this mantra is that it's not even wrong, the problem is that it gets to its correct conclusion from a misguided perspective. What, was all of this different when there was still only Netflix? It is now that Netflix and Co. switch to more predatory monetization methods that now piracy is morally acceptable? Like, what are we, philosophy preschool students? This is such a philosophical non-starter. See Claim. Big conglomerate streaming services were always predatory businesses that exploited people, just because now they make you pay more than you used to be willing to pay and now that they are doing some predatory tactics with which content to keep and which to move/cancel, this changes nothing about morals. The real problem is that apparently there has to be a big corpo between you and the producers of a show in the first place. Friends, streaming services of all kinds were always bad, you just didn't feel the consequences of trusting big corpo yet.
The real losers of streaming services are artists, especially music artists on Spotify who have been getting scammed out of their plays per months revenue ever since Spotify launched, because Spotify is a top-heavy platform that rewards already big creators and punishes smaller ones (sounds like capitalism to me). Ask a local musician from your hometown what they think about Spotify, and you will see that they have not a single good word to say about it. But even large creators, say in the movies and shows industry, get pitied with minimal returns from their licensed plays on Netflix and such. That's why I said in the beginning of the page that streaming services were good for the corpo and the user, because who's really getting fucked over here are the people actually creating the content we consume.
The phrase “If Buying isn't Owning, then Pirating isn't Stealing” may look smart, it uses the trappings of morality to disguise itself as something insightful, even though in reality it just completely misses the mark and says nothing of value whatsoever, because it misunderstands the moral status quo. Pirating has never been inherently bad, even during times where buying still meant that you actually owned things. Whether the concept of “ownership” is reconcilable with morality in the first place is another topic, but for now I will just say that this mantra just has nothing to do with the topic we are actually talking about and, even if it had, it tries to argue from the wrong angle. Piracy wasn't immoral before, and corpos changing their tactics doesn't make it any more or less immoral now. This is not legal advice. It's, at best, philosophical advice.