I would just like to share a story, and probably an opinion as well. When I was doing my STEM undergraduate degree a couple of years ago, I took a course in which I had to use MATLAB. I won’t disclose too much information, but it was a course involving computation.

Well, we (the students) weren’t given a student/institutional license of any sort, but the course coordinator still insisted on using MATLAB. We took it as an implicit instruction to “somehow” obtain MATLAB. In the end, one guy in our class pirated it and distributed it the whole class.

Before that though, I did approach my course coordinator, asking them if it’s possible to use other software like GNU Octave, which is a clone of MATLAB. Personally I think it should also possible to use any other programming language like Python for example, since the important part is the computation part, in my opinion. They refused any discussion and did not even consider alternatives, instead basically forcing us to “obtain” MATLAB. How else? Well.

As I have said, we all pirated it in the end.

I did something quite interesting though, which is that for every quiz, assignment, and projects that we had, I’ll run the same exact MATLAB code on GNU Octave, to see if it’s compatible. And it is. It works flawlessly. There’s only one function that GNU Octave didn’t support back the (this was a couple of years ago), and even then, it wasn’t an essential feature, you could use other software for that function as well.

By the end of that semester, I had compiled almost all input/output of the MATLAB code alongside its GNU Octave’s counterpart, to demonstrate that we didn’t need to pirate MATLAB to get through this undergraduate course.

Regrettably though, I didn’t follow through. So sad!

Do you think piracy is justified in this case?

  • mafbar@lemmy.worldOP
    27·
    1 year ago

    What do you say to people whose position is “you are stealing their work; nothing is free”?

      • desconectado@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        I hear that everywhere in here, but it doesn’t make any sense. Do you own the electricity network? Do you own the maid that clean your house? Do you own the room in the hotel? Is it justified not to pay for those services?

        • fabian@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          When you steal electricity, someone else can’t use it, the capacity is consumed. When you won’t pay the maid, he can’t get his labor and time back to use elsewhere. When you squat in a hotel room, someone else can’t use it and it needs to be cleaned afterwards.

          When you “buy” a piece of software or a digital copy of media, you’re really just renting the license to use it as long as the company that rented it you feels like it.

          The difference is that when you make a copy of something digital, the original is still completely intact. The thing is not consumed, you can copy that file 10,000 times on your own machine and see for yourself.

          • desconectado@lemm.eeEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            Yeah, but that piece of software didn’t came up to existence out of nowhere. Someone invested time, or paid for infrastructure to complete it. When you steal electricity, most of the cost is because of the infrastructure you used, which you will never own anyway.

            I agree information should be free, as long as the generator of that information agrees with it.

            Saying that, I still pirate things, not because I think I’m entitled to do it, that’s a very poor excuse.

            • fabian@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              1 year ago

              You are right, of course, the people who labored to make the things should be compensated if they want to be.

              What’s at issue is that if you own something you can do as you please with it. Once the electricity has been delivered I can charge batteries with it or power lights or give it to my neighbor for free if we agree to do so. I should be able to buy a piece of software and back it up or give it to my neighbor, or any random person I choose if I own it. I would buy much more media if I could just own it and do as I please with it, but because of DRM and the greed of companies that distribute the media most times you can only rent it. Piracy is in resurgence because it is becoming so difficult and expensive to just pay for the media.

              I pay for Netflix, so I think I am entitled to whatever is on the service. If I have a copy of a Netflix show on my hard drive in 4k, am I taking something from Netflix? What about when I watch that show in VLC because I’m on an airplane? What about when I let the man next to me have a copy so he can watch it on his device?

              While I have plenty of disposable income these days to spend on media, they simply do not sell the product that I want, and if I did not have the other means of accessing that content I doubt I would pay for Netflix.

              –

              I hope the tone of my comments do not come across as negative, I am trying to illustrate my thoughts on the subject, not argue, and I find questions more illuminating than just explanations.

              –

              edit: i guess the OP was about software and this rant doesnt really apply

              Software-wise I dont pirate that because I try to only use open source software, for mostly the same reasons of disliking DRM and prefering to own things.

        • mafbar@lemmy.worldOP
          1·
          1 year ago

          That’s an interesting perspective actually, since it gets into all sorts of weirdness and trickiness of the intellectual property concept. Perhaps because of two factors: (i) we treat digital data as fundamentally different from physical objects, and (ii) theft intuitively implies that the original object is no longer with the owner, but with piracy, you’re simply making a copy-and-paste, rather than a cut-and-paste.

          • sab@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            1 year ago

            In the end it’s all just a linguistics game though - you’re profiting off the work somebody did, without paying the rate they charge for it.

            But that’s exactly the kind of answer you’ll get in a community focused on piracy. Most people wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t already justified piracy.

            • mafbar@lemmy.worldOP
              2·
              1 year ago

              Yeah, the theft comes from stealing someone’s labour, rather than their products. But it depends on the situation though.

    • elmicha@feddit.deEnglish
      183·
      1 year ago

      You already pointed out that there is a free alternative, so anyone who says “nothing is free” is a bit mentally challenged.

      • mafbar@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Yea of course but we’re talking about piracy, so when we pirate proprietary software, they’ll of object with “nothing is free, you gotta pay”. It’s either we pay for that, or fundamentally uphold piracy as some means or some ends, or use and support open-source software. Not a lot of choices, really.

      • mafbar@lemmy.worldOP
        1·
        1 year ago

        I think I get that as well. I used to talk quite a bit about open-source to my friends, but looking back, it seemed quite preachy (maybe because I was quite young at the time), and it never really changed anything. This is especially the case since open-source (or free software) is a philosophical approach to technology that many people might be unfamiliar with or simply don’t care about. I just simply use open-source software, supports devs/foundations, and only will talk the necessary bits if someone asks me about it.