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Who was the victim in this case? What was the harm actually inflicted upon them? Is there any evidence-backed reason to believe that there was actual harm done rather than that there might have been actual harm done?

Spoiler: nobody, nothing, and no.

Obviously it's good that this person was not sent to prison but it's only because this person plead guilty (read: was coerced into a guilty plea for fear of being sent to prison) of doing something that caused no practical harm.

If one would like to provide a different perspective, this is where I get hung up: Is there any evidence-backed reason to believe that there was actual harm done rather than that there might have been actual harm done? If no, why is any punishment justified? If yes, what is that (evidence-backed) reason?

We frequently criminalize acts that factually result in no harms in specific, individual cases, but can be assumed to be harmful if carried out universally.

Should we not punish people who drive at excess speed on empty roads, or embezzlers who steal money but later return it, or drug dealers who sell only to moderate users?

That's an interesting point but I would personally disagree with the premise that the behavior in the headline is harmful if carried out universally[0].

Digital media to some extent, and the public internet to a greater extent, broke copyright. To your point, it makes sense to prevent someone from trying to start a business using a bunch of stolen creative work, but this person's behavior was not to seek profit.

Anyway, those first two examples are very good to demonstrate your point (I don't want to get into it because it's off-topic but I don't think the drug dealer example works as well as the other two). I do find myself thinking that punishment is still deserved in those cases for exactly the reason you suggest.

[0] Specifically talking about the sharing of data, not how the data was initially acquired to be shared ("hacked" Netflix employee credentials). This person is not being prosecuted for how the data was initially copied, only for continuing to copy it.

In common law systems, there is often a differentiation between actions that are only crimes if there's a particular harm, and one where that requirement doesn't hold ... the former are "result crimes" and the latter "conduct crimes".

e.g. in English law, the offense of "indecent exposure" (i.e. showing your genitals in public) used to require that this cause "obstruction, annoyance or danger" to at least one person - it was a result crime.

The law was subsequently changed because I guess they decided it wasn't really necessary to have the prosecution carry the burden of proof on that; so it became a conduct crime.

This distinction is not something I'd heard of before, so thanks for the explanation.

It seems to me that I fundamentally disagree with this idea of a conduct crime. Prosecutors should be expected to prove the harm that was caused by the actions for which a person is having criminal charges pressed against them. (I don't know of anything like this in American law; per my understanding, if you do the thing that's written down as not to do, you did bad.) If it's expected that it will be obvious what the harm is, then it can be expected that proving it (or convincing a judge of it) will be easy.

Anyway, maybe I'll be able to come up with a counter example but I'm coming up blank currently.

> Should we not punish people who drive at excess speed on empty roads, or embezzlers who steal money but later return it, or drug dealers who sell only to moderate users?

IMO: No.

(sorry, posted this comment in the wrong thread by accident)

Do you think at least some of the content that was shared would have been purchased otherwise? We can't measure the impact directly but it's odd to assume that pirating content somehow does not affect the wellbeing of creators and other participants of the market.

I can say anecdotally with 100% confidence that when I can't easily find a freely available copy of a movie to watch online I pay for it.

The answer to that is pretty clear, there's never been a single research paper which manage to demonstrate a monetary loss.
I don't have a link to a scientific paper. But if you want to sum the losses yourself, here is something to start with:

1. Last Sunday I streamed a movie called Stutz (2022) for free instead of purchasing it from Netflix. That's a loss of $16 for the industry (1 month subscription, but I am not interested in anything else from their catalog).

This example is a good demonstration of my point: when the copyrighted digital work is not made artificially scarce, it is worthless. Prior to digital copying, that scarcity was not artificial; it actually cost people money to copy and distribute things and those people more often than not were trying to see what they copied.

Someone was distributing that movie for free because the movie did not have value in a market.

You probably would have never bought the subscription for a single movie anyways regardless of the ability to download it elsewhere. Netflix has an all-you-can-eat buffet model, casual watchers are incentivized to not use the platform because it's not cost effective.

In the economic pricing models, free is counted separately as any other kind of pricing.

This debate has been settled for more than a decade, major copyright holder conglomerates have tried their best and poured a lot of money to try to demonstrate losses and they have failed.

Why do you search out pirated content when you can pay for it? Since I'm an adult with a decent paying job now, I pay for everything I can afford. I don't think I've pirated a program or movie in 5 years now.
That's a completely different question, of course. But to answer: on many occasions I am not committed to a particular movie, so just watch it in the background for a while and might end up not finishing. Sometimes I don't want to deal with different services or even a subscription required to watch a single movie/show legally (Paramount+ on Amazon or a Netflix show). Again, if I have to I will pay, but the convenience of free movie websites is great.

There are probably other reasons but I would be really surprised if my behavior was an exception. I can pay for movies but it's more convenient not to (sometimes).

When you live outside the USA? Some content you cannot get for any amount of money due to syndication deals, and providers like HBO have spotty availability.

I already pay for Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+ and Apple TV+, but their content libraries are smaller outside the US by some margin.

I pirate HBO and other services since there is no legal pathway to stream it where I live, and I’m not forking out to get it from whichever shitty local service bought the rights.

Happy to pay once they actually offer it worldwide as a first party option!

I'm against a $3.99 digital rental out of principal
Do you think at least some of the content that was shared would have been purchased otherwise? We can't measure the impact directly but it's odd to assume that pirating content somehow does not affect the wellbeing of creators and other participants of the market.

I can say anecdotally with 100% confidence that when I can't easily find a freely available copy of a movie to watch online I pay for it.

> pirating content somehow does not affect the wellbeing of creators and other participants of the market

Why are we assuming there's a viable market? People are trying to sell something that's worthless[0] and they're whining when other people offer it for free. I get that someone had to go through the trouble -- admittedly it's usually a fair amount of effort -- to make the thing that others want but, unfortunately, they didn't make something from which they can expect to profit. I think many people would prefer that to be different but that is just how it is (from my perspective).

[0] This is controversial, and thus the likely point of disagreement for most. If the only thing I need is 1 copy of The Little Mermaid (and a computer) to make 1e9 copies of The Little Mermaid, then The Little Mermaid doesn't have value as a thing to be sold.

So no books, movies, music - anything that can be duplicated digitally - has value as a thing to be sold? I am sorry, I am not sure this is a genuine argument.

Why does digital duplication make any difference? When you are buying a physical book you are not paying just for the paper and the printing process. So the remaining part of the cost - writer's check, publisher's check, etc - is what you should be paying for when consuming things digitally (plus the cost of streaming, storage and whatnot).

> Why are we assuming there's a viable market?

Because there is? There is a proven, big, viable, essential market for creating and distributing ideas.

You seem to be understanding me correctly. When one buys a physical book, they are paying for the paper and the printing process. That is the barrier to entry for producing such a copy for sharing, distinctly different from producing a shareable copy of, e.g., a .mp4 file.

This person did not have this barrier to entry and therefore they did not see value in selling what they copied. The work does not have value in a market unless the value is propped up artificially as is currently being done by copyright law.

> I am sorry, I am not sure this is a genuine argument.

If it helps, these markets were clearly viable when certain resources were required to copy and distribute works. The difference with today is the public internet and the proliferation of personal general-purpose computers that people like to keep on themselves at all times. It's new and it's causing market disruptions.

Finally, I'll say that many people will choose to give money for things even if they aren't otherwise required to pay: Humble Bundle, Patreon, Youtube, Twitch, etc. People donate to the Wikimedia Foundation only because they are asked, to the point that that the organization now has an order of magnitude more money in the bank than Wikipedia's annual operating costs (recent funding controversies aside, they donate because they think it helps keep around something they'd like to see stick around).

Your position somehow completely ignores the cost of... producing the content itself. It might come as a surprise, but people who write books, make music, film movies all have expenses. Yes it's "free" to make a digital copy, but that ignores the cost of producing content. It sometimes takes years to produce and release a movie, hundreds if not thousands of people are involved. Who is paying for that? Should they all go to Patreon and ask for donations?
Touring is the biggest source of revenue for the musician. If they show up and you buy a ticket to their show, you've just given them maybe an order of magnitude more money than they would ever have gotten from you from record sales or streams alone. If you buy one of the $40 fruit of the loom shirts they are selling then that covers the costs for another dozen pirates.

Plus, what about used physical media? Do you think if I bought a used Beatles cd, I should be mailing a $20 bill to Paul McCartney? Am I stealing from Paul when I listen to that CD for free from the library? Or when I borrow my friends CD? Should the FBI come a knocking if my friend remixes it into a mixtape? Absolutely not. So it shouldn't be considered stealing when someone passes me a digital file that came from someone down the line buying the album.

> It might come as a surprise, ...

Please don't condescend.

> Yes it's "free" to make a digital copy, but that ignores the cost of producing content.

I am not ignoring the cost, I am simply not respecting it. They are trying to run a business; the costs of doing so are their problem. If they cannot capture revenue to offset the mentioned costs, then they do not have a viable business. Currently, copyright law is required for the revenue to be captured, thus the business is not viable.

It is unfortunate, but I don't see how I am mistaken (I can understand disagreement that copyright law is broken, but it would be disagreement).

> essential market

A market that relies on government granted monopoly is not a market.

> buying a physical book you are not paying just for the paper and the printing process

But it should. Books should only be priced the cost of the paper and ink.

The very first Nobel winner Paul Samuelson[0] makes the argument here[1] when discussing how lighthouse economics works that anything with zero marginal costs that has a price other than free is by definition an economic loss. If it is in the best interest to have lighthouses, or firemen, or media, they should fund the creation themselves and everyone should be able to enjoy the results.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Samuelson

[1]: https://courses.cit.cornell.edu/econ335/out/lighthouse.pdf - page 359, first paragraph

If it had no value then people would not want it, so would not pirate it.

The simple fact that people want to pirate a thing means it has value.

If I get a copy of my friend's copy of The Wolf of Wall Street -- of course which they got from a torrent -- the real world value of a new copy that I create approaches nil.
Marginal value going to zero does not negate original total value, it only increases the total value more slowly per item.

The items still have value, and now larger total value than before.

You're sinking your own argument.

Fair enough, I lost myself in that comment.

What I mean to say is that the thing has no value in a market where it's being sold digitally. If it's so easy for a person to make copies of something and share it with their friends then some people will make every copy they can and give it to whomever asks. In this world of proliferated general purpose computers and the public internet, it turns out people can make infinite copies and give them to everyone. I 1) do not think it's necessarily wrong for someone to choose to do that and 2) do not agree with where the line has been drawn for when it is considered wrong. In this case, the person downloaded 100TB and uploaded 20TB and we're saying it's wrong enough to be 5 times more receptive than giving that we threaten prison.

All that being said, I see a situation where someone thinks they have something they can sell, but then it happens that anyone can indiscriminately make and share copies of the thing so it's not actually worth buying. The producers of the thing then start whining about people making copies and those people who choose to do that get thrown in prison. It's very hard for me not to see the people being imprisoned as the victims when the people alleging harm have done fuck all to prove that they were caused any harm.

unless using rhetoric, we still dont know how to deal with copyright/piracy/digital art in 2022
i think the issue with torrenting/"downloading" which isn't touched upon in my experience is as follows:

we live in an age where the barrier to content creation is next to nothing. For music production (an area I'm fairly knowledgable) we have a plethora of free DAWs, free incredible instruments, very affordable recording hardware, excellent sub $200 microphones and so on. The explosion of creator content is incredible.

It's almost not necessary to listen to something more than twice in this day and age, as just when you've finished listening to today's hype, tomorrow's hype is around the corner.

If i use bandcamp's recommended album pricing of USD$7 and round to $10 (im from AUD) for some easy maths. Say i am exposed to 10 albums a day which frankly is very easy...that's $100. If I'm exposed to 10 albums per day, 7 days a week, that's $700. If i multiply this by 52, that's $36,400 per annum. That's more or less minimum wage.

You might think "10 albums a day is ridiculous", so - i'll half it for you...is $15,200 a year for digital files - a good value proposition, assuming I will listen to these files probably 3 times each? Max?

If the artists creating this kind of content cant afford to pay for it themselves to get the inspiration required to create it...who does this model work for?

It's a huge piece of irony, considering plenty of these major artists were influenced from listening to mix tapes or cds passed around by friends.
a further piece of superior irony is trent reznor being famously notorious OINK tracker user, then becoming head of Apple Music at one point :)
Not everyone gets to make money from content creation. But if the content is good people will naturally donate to keep the creator creating. The fact that adblockers didn't wipe out YouTuber shows it.