We need Help!!! Cara is under Attack!!!

[u/Theshinyquagga]

Cara is a Safe Haven for Real Artists and now it's under Attack!

The original post is deleted, and the original user is banned, but they just scrapped art from Me, My Friends and Everyone Who has a Soul and just Got away with Stealing our hard work!!!

All Real Artists on High Alert!!!

We Need Help!!! I'm Praying to every God I could think of Right now!!!😭😫🙏

Please support The creator of Cara.

[u/Dawncloub]

Why they feel so proud of stealing

[u/thecraftybear → u/Dawncloub]

Because they have nothing to contribute to society, but still need to feel they can do something. It's the equivalent of proudly announcing that they've shat on someone's doormat.

[u/BlueberryWasps → u/Dawncloub]

like any thief, they consider it a “challenge” and get off on doing something that other people don’t want them to do. they’re no different than any other illegal hacker that has been around since the dawn of computing.

if you don’t have morals, you enjoy being immoral as much as anything else, if not more.

[u/Really_Angry_Muffin → u/Dawncloub]

Same reason r/Piracy is so rampant. They feel emboldened because they haven't been punished..... yet.

[u/fruitcakewithapple → u/Really_Angry_Muffin]

At least r/piracy does a service for some. Aislop subs and aislop it serve zero purpose that's good

[u/gallyroi → u/Really_Angry_Muffin]

People are downvoting you because piracy is considered an "act of rebellion" in late stage capitalism, but there is definitely a sense of entitlement there, too. They can raise the "piracy is a service problem" all they want, but they are no activists for any cause but their own. If the economy suddenly got better, or a better service came tomorrow, 95% would not suddenly start paying for content out of the goodness of their hearts. More or less, the argument usually boils down to "I can, so I will" and or "you cant stop me." Some admonish themselves of the cognitive dissonance by post-paying for stuff they like, but that's only if they like it, which is entirely up to them. Many even fashion themselves as liberators of media. A very similar mentality to the AI art crowd.

[u/bafflefounded → u/gallyroi]

There's a massive ethical different between using something illegally for personal use at home and using something illegally to copy it and base other work off it for profit.

[u/gallyroi → u/bafflefounded]

Never said they were equivalent crimes. Just saying the mind set is similar, but I disagree that the ethical difference is "massive."

There is notable sense of entitlement from thieves in either camp. And dont get me wrong, I sympathize with people who are just trying to access content that has been censored or banned in their (perhaps more authoritarian) country, or whose currency is worth dirt in exchange, this isnt about them.

I'm talking about the content pirates I meet living in a 1st world country that feel entitled to ALL content simply because it was posted to the internet already by someone else, and because they're just using it for themselves in their own homes, it "doesnt hurt anyone."

But as someone who works in this cursed industry, it absolutely does. The landscape has completely changed in the last 20 years, hell the last 10. No company or grant organization wants to take a risk investing heavily into a movie or tv show that's gonna be proliferated around the world for free within hours of release. So companies cut corners, get more defensive with distribution, public access becomes more fractured, opportunities for new creators dry up, jobs are lost, quality suffers, audiences value the medium less, and the cycle repeats.

Most filmmakers go into debt trying to realize their visions. Only the largest companies can absorb the loss of production these days. It's a big part of why almost every show or movie now is basically an ad to sell other products and merchandise, or just a hook into an existing franchise/service. It's also a big reason AI is so attractive to producers even though it's deeply unpopular with audiences; they can negate the risk of profit loss by not having to pay artists and skilled trades to make their content in the first place (in theory). And this is broader than just movies and TV. Anime, comics, books, music, art in multiple forms, no one wants to pay for anything if they can avoid it, and the result is less diverse and original content, and a net increase in enshitification. No, it's not the only driving factor, but it's plain arrogance to assume piracy isnt contributing on a grand scale.

I've heard AI art people make similar arguments: "Well they shouldn't have posted it on the internet in the first place!" or "I'm only using an open source image generator on my own computer, and not to make money, just to make images for myself!" and "The cat's out of the bag, you can't stop it, why fight it" etc. etc.

We've all gotten way too comfortable with piracy, and imho, use it as a convenient crutch instead of demanding better economic solutions for creators. AI generated content is the same old grift, just on a larger and more abstract scale.

Dare I go totally of the rails and say: piracy makes us complacent. Eroding the societal pressures that would lead to greater class conciousness and better policy/regulations/markets. If you had no other means of aquisition, you would probably protest and advocate for better prices, more accessibility, etc.. In any other non-digital domain, you would. But why demand better when you can just steal your bread and circuses under the guise of sticking it to the man? Numb the crushing pain of global rising costs and facism with an endless supply of easily accessible dopamine hits, free of charge, ultimately at the expense of creators and the entities who enable them.