Privateering usually meant the state’s navy issued the ship and demanded a substantial share of the prize leading to creative accounting at sea. It was a deal taken typically by naval officers who might otherwise be tempted to desert when going on the account is offering better prizes and career options. (Desertion to piracy was a big problem in the Queen’s Navee.)
A letter of marque means you can find safe port at colonies of the issuing state so long as you are attacking its enemies (usually Spanish vessels during the Golden Age).
Piracy is midnight oyster and clam harvesting without a license to break the oyster cartel, making restaurant oysters and clams more available and cheaper to customers.
It is from this grand tradition along the US West Coast that the notion of media piracy rose, and much like the Golden Age of Piracy robbing the Spanish Silver Train, piracy is associated with snatching ill-gotten gains from those who don’t deserve it, sometimes benefiting communities that do. (YMMV).
Media Piracy is copyright infringement, which is totally not stealing.
The US Supreme Court taking content out of the public domain so that it can be reserved for private use isn’t stealing either, but it causes more harm than piracy.
We also get little conversation about how copyright extensions and patent trilling robs the public use of public-domain content, especially when the Mouse is lobbying the federal government to extend rights further.
Be willing to murder your colleagues?
And what does that mean? That drivers for most hardware doesn’t exist unless we write it ourselves? I don’t have time for that steep a climb.
You guys are now seriously freaking me out. My experience has been decades of windows not mainframes with 1980s era OSes. Is all that experience going to be useless?
I’m looking forward to owning my computer, especially as Microsoft claws away more of my rights season by season. But WTF am I getting myself into when I make the jump? Is it possible to own my computer and have an easy to understand OS?
I hope I’m not fucking myself when I try to make the switch, but when the first response to it’s got problems is don’t look a gift horse in the mouth then yeah, it makes me a bit worried I’m going to be left out in the elements on my own by a community with the attitude of COD gamers.
Most IP owners didn’t create what they have, but bought it off someone else. I have little pity for rich people.
I’d say society is better off with no IP related temporary monopoly than the system we have. There are enough instances where creators die penniless and publishers make all the profits to suggest there already is no financial incentive for an inventor to invent. Like Goodyear, they do it more as a hobby or in the interest of society.
Maybe if we had social safety nets so everyone not rich wasn’t desperate, we might be able to have a robust innovation sector that was less focused on using law to screw competitors and consumers.
We kinda knew this was going to happen. New Hollywood really wants to be classic Hollywood, where the studios own the lives of the actors and control every aspect. But I expected them to start by cyber-thesbianning Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, Jean Harlow and Clark Gable.
But yeah, the studios are going through a creativity crisis, now decades into a best practices run of avoiding new ideas for less risky sequels and high concept films, preferring spectacle over introspection and character study.
The copyright maximalism and Hollywood accounting isn’t really about piracy or greed so much as desperation to keep old promises of exponential dividend growth.
Every bubble eventually pops, and the longer they try to keep it intact, the more disastrous the outcome.
In the meantime, I look forward to when small indie directors can star Bogart and Harlow in their concept film.
Heh. During the Trump administration when all the Republican elected officials we’re shouting Free Speech In Social Media because Trump was getting factchecked on Twitter, we fantasized about a state-serves social media platform that would be as free-speechy as the state legally allowed.
Not that it would be useful except to point at it and say if you don’t moderate your platform, it’ll turn into this!
I expected some poor bureaucrat would have to clear all the CSAM but the furry-futa porn would remain, as would all the advertisements for penis pills and Nigerian princes. The hate speech would stay up but get tracked until someone got radicalized by it.
I was called too lazy as a kid so much that it figures largely in my debilitating disability. Then in the 90s studying psychology I developed a hypothesis there was no such thing as laziness (or the sin sloth as its recognized by post-Calvanist Protestantism) rather all instances of avolition could be traced to dysfunction, poor health or misunderstanding the degree of fatigue caused by the necessary work.
By the 2010s the psychology sector came to the same conclusion, that productivity could be improved by creating a healthy environment for work that allowed people to do human things between tasks (take bathroom breaks, check social media, eat snacks, etc.) Or can be decreased by making the work environment toxic (crunching, harassment, stale offerings in the vending machine, pressure to not take relief breaks, etc.)
The epidemic lockdown of 2020 and mass furlogh actually vindicated these hypotheses (though I haven’t read the studies) when people turned to hobbies with fervent obsession, often enough yielding marketable results, resulting in the great resignation.
Having recently migrated from Reddit (and kept up with commercial social media hacks) I’m used to Nothing To See Here! We totally didn’t store your personal information in plaintext for hackers to snatch. Oh and maybe please change your passwords. All Part Of The Show!
So, by comparison, the response here is downright heartwarming.
Youtube’s ad policy is abusive, and online ads are not always safe. Regardless of whether adblocking is legal or fair to Youtube, not doing so puts you at greater risk of malware insertion so is a necessary safety precaution.
As YouTube profits from your engagement through more than ads, YouTube still benefits even when you watch videos without ads.
To answer your question, for the non-tech-savvy having to pick a server is, yes, too much of a leap. We are conditioned in the industrialized capitalist world against making decisions we don’t understand.
If we want to market it, we could make a wizard that randomly designates a server from a set of cooperating servers. Include also reminders that a user can join multiple servers and each one has separate rules (say, regarding posting NSFW material even to appropriate communities.)
I just talked to a Redditor who was entirely unfamiliar with the recent changes at Reddit.
Pirating is like church sins, less about avoiding causing harm and more about preserving hierarchy and tradition, even though abuses and theft by intellectual property holders cause way more harm and economic cost than infringement, by multiple orders of magnitude.
Property is theft. <Bolshevik chorus swells>