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I’m amused at these statements these ‘wannabe’ pirates make to justify piracy. A smart person would pirate quietly without letting the world know or justifying it.
I know why I do it & I don’t want some validation, internet points, 2 minutes of fame to sound / look cool.
You’ve just let the world know you’re pirating though
oops lol
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Because for some piracy isn’t simply about being a cheapskate but also about activism
Theres some truth to this, but a lot of people do use this as a shield against the general cultural acceptance that piracy is stealing or otherwise morally underhanded. I do it, but I don’t have any illusion I’m one of the activists. I just get indignant and refuse to pay someone for content or entertainment who I think is damaging to the medium or predatory in general. I feel like if I really wanted to make a statement, I just wouldn’t consume their work at all – but life is short and I want to have my cake and eat it too.
It’s possible to do both, I consume plenty of pirated media simply because it’s unavailable due to pathetic capitalist imposed digital distribution limitations and lack of equitable paid access.
I also consume other pirated media because I wouldn’t spend my resources for access because I don’t yet know the value of the content and won’t pay just for an opportunity to be disappointed, been there enough times to have learned that lesson. I’m happy to spend my time to find out your media sucks, but not my money, because that’s also my time with the addition that I’ve put actual effort into converting it into fungible assets.
I also deliberately pirate media that I would pay for and do understand the value of, both because I can’t always afford to purchase said product from a company making billions of dollars in exploitative corporate profits and because I have no interest in caring about that over my own personal satisfaction in life.
Wouldn’t it achieve more to boycott things instead? If you won’t even give up watching a tv show, you aren’t an activist you are just complaining on the internet.
Who said anything about a boycott? Do you just regurgitate shit you heard elsewhere without understanding the context of it?
Your wrong. It’s what Jesus did, when the baker and fisherman couldn’t meet market demand.
I don’t want some validation, internet points, 2 minutes of fame to sound / look cool.
No, you just need everyone to know you don’t care about sounding/looking cool to sound/look cool. Totally different.
Too cool to be cool syndrome.
How did you do formatting injection in your username?
On the website you can modify your user display name with any font set you like. I used a random fancy font website and simply copy and pasted.
Nice, thanks!
I believe its just a display name, which I assume probably doesn’t have as more lax rules on valid characters (such as emojis) than usernames do.
So true! Here, have some internet points and validation!
“A smart person would pirate quietly without letting the world know” While posting “I do it & I don’t want some validation…”
As much fun as setting up a torrent box is, being an argumentative asshole is even better.
Hypocrisy doesn’t make them incorrect. If you’re going to be a pedant get better at it.
You’re so right! Here have an internet point.
You just said admitted to pirating, you little muppet.
While I do have no morals when it comes to copying smb elses hard work(I am a programmer, basically my job) I Support games when they are good. Movies are rarely any good but the cinema isn’t as expensive for me anymore than when I was a student.
And most important you can’t refund bad movies in the cinema.
I still think it should be illegal to sell someone elses work though. This also means profiting from it when you use it in your product/development environment.
TL;DR:
Piracy can be a means of demonstration to show the flaws in copyright. Which obviously needs to be public.
Especially when the statement makes no sense
They are screaming because they rather pay for convenience, but that is not how it works.
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Now for most sources of media it’s more ethical to pirate their content than obtain it legitimately.
Though granted, if you want to hurt the company more than by pirating their content, you can by not pirating their content.
(Sadly, as seen with The Wizard Game, people are not so motivated to walk away from their beloved franchises. So ⛵️🏴☠️🦜⚔️🌊)
Confused - how does not pirating hurt the company more? Wouldn’t it be the exact same outcome for the company (as when pirated) or is this kinda like when GoT was arguing their popularity is even bigger when you look at the number of people torrenting their episodes
When we consume content and like it we have a tendency to want to patronize it, so yeah, if you pirated Wednesday season one, you’re more likely to watch season two buy T-shirts and other swag, look for more Addams related content, and so on.
A good example of this happened in Russia when Neil Gaiman’s books hadn’t yet been marketed there. There were some unofficial and crowdsourced translations (some Russians learned English just to read Gaiman!) and so when the market finally reached Russia, it exploded, because the fan base had already been established.
GoT was an unusual case because HBO was bought separately from normal cable packages, and so fewer people had it, so it depended on piracy and social contacts (groups gathering for viewing parties at their friend’s house). There were even public venues who would show the new episode (unofficially, so an unlicensed public performance) and by HBO ignoring these, it allowed the fanbase to swell to incredible proportions (at least until Season 8 which popped that bubble). Still, there are tons of spin-off markets from which HBO (now MAX) continues to profit.
When we like our content, we become invested in it. It becomes part of our lifestyle. We talk about it with friends. We make friends with folks who are also fans. And this is the point when we’re susceptible to collectables and spinoffs.
Also we† pirate for one of three reasons:
- We can’t afford to buy the content but want to consume it. Or it’s not available in our region
- The official version is odious to use (has DRM, forces us to watch commercials, etc.)
- The company that makes this stuff is malignant (cruel to its employees, bigoted against marginalized groups in the society, is associated with dangerous sects and subcultures) and we don’t really want to support them.
So in those cases where these are not factors, most people are going to choose to not pirate content they like, or support it in other ways. (If you want to support musical artists, it’s far less important that you buy their songs on iTunes, and far more important that you go to their concerts when you can. And buy their concert t-shirt for $60. John Coulton also takes tips.)
† We in this case refers to the larger demographic of those capable of pirating. When a product is expensive or unavailable or whatever, people who sometimes buy will look for ways to pirate or obtain deals or whatever. Yes, there will be piracy enthusiasts who never buy, but that’s a slender demographic despite what the anti-piracy propaganda might suggest. Also if content is only pirated, that may mean it was never officially released, or the release version was really poor quality.
I think some still feel some level of guilt about it and naturally, whether consciously or subconsciously, rationalize it with ideas like this. I guess the progression from that is posting about it to show that “yes I pirate, but I’m not a bad person because rationalization”.
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.
Until we live in a world where people have equal access to information and essential technology piracy is a moral imperative.
Should something which costs a few hours worth of work in the developed word cost three weeks worth of work in a less developed country, just to make a publishing company worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars a few extra bucks? Of course not!
Every other argument is a moot point to me. If I hadn’t pirated Photoshop and other software when I was a poor kid I wouldn’t have the six figure career I have today. The ultrarich steal from us every day in more ways than I can count. Maybe when they start being held accountable I will start caring about their bottom line.
Here I am wondering why there is still a downvote button in the YouTube comments… it does nothing!
The same reason that a lot of crosswalks have fake buttons. So you feel like you have control.
While simultaneously undermining your sense of trust in the world
and why elevators have non functioning close buttons
Some elevators.
All the ones near me have fully functional close buttons.
true, it definitely depends where you live. If you’re in the US then it’s definitely a case of most don’t work, because most elevators at this point have been made after 1990, but if you live somewhere else then it can definitely be a case of some, or even none
but that said there definitely are functioning crosswalk buttons that work so being pedantic about some, most, etc, is irrelevant because as long as there are any that dont work its relevant to the topic
The downvotes are still counted, just not displayed. You can re-enable it via browser extensions.
Pretty sure those extensions all use some sort of estimate methodology, the dislikes aren’t available via any apis or anything
some sort of estimate methodology
Hey GPT4 watch this video and tell me what its ratio of likes to dislikes would be
Interesting, I wonder exactly how they work, then?
I’ve never used one myself but I’ve heard talk of various ones either A) taking the public (real) like number and extrapolating the dislikes based on an old like/dislike ratio available for the video from before the dislike removal (doesn’t work on new videos) or B) the extension includes a feature where the user can like/dislike the video within the extension and then the dislike number is extrapolated using the public (real) like number and the extension’s private like/dislike ratio. In either case the number is not connected to the “real” dislike count that YouTube would have access to internally
For videos. The commnt dislike has done nothing for years
Oh, didn’t realize it was referring to comments. Yeah, that one’s pointless!
Actually it’s worse than nothing. Youtube promotes comments based on engagement, so while only an upvote increases the tally, voting at all still makes it more visible.
Do we really need excuses for pirating media?
I pirate movies because I think digital access to them is overpriced, goes to the copyright holder instead of the creators, it’s convenient and most importantly because I can.
I can’t pirate going to the cinema, nor can I afford to build my own, therefore I gladly pay to have a seat and enjoy a movie there.
Edit: I thought this may be relevant to the movies example I gave. I don’t think movie studios, giving nothing back to society after massive profits are the ones we should debate the morals of stealing with.
But all of those are excuses?
I just want to point out to anyone who thinks this is a viable legal defence, It isn’t.
You would be considered to be stealing from the rights holder. The rights holder authorises your use of their property when you pay the license fee. If you don’t pay the license fee you are considered to be stealing their property.
Just to be clear, I agree with the sentiment of this post. Legally speaking though, this defence would be cut down in moments.
Legally speaking they’re not going after you solely for piracy pretty much ever, at least not in America, unless you’re making a profit from it.
I just want to point out to anyone who thinks this is a viable legal defence, It isn’t.
Of course it isn’t. Copyright laws were written by the same kind of people who decided that corporations gets to “people.”
I think this logic is silly.
Employers don’t own you, so witholding wages for services you provided isn’t stealing. Getting a haircut and not paying isn’t stealing.
I think the better justification is: rights holders make it a pain in the arse to access content affordably, so fuck you, just going to steal it.
You’re only partly right. You example services. Of course it is not possible to own services. Piracy is only applicable to products. The point of the Twitter guy is, that companies intentionally stop selling their software etc. as products to sell you the same thing as a service, so that you cannot own it.
Not only that. Remember when Sony said that you don’t own the PS4 you bought for several hundred bucks but just purchased the right to use it as intended so you’re not allowed to tinker with it and for example install another operating system or figure out how their security works.
That’s what is meant by buying is not owning anymore.
I could go on about cars with subscriptions for heated seats that are already installed but not turned on etc.
It’s true that SaaS does stop you from owning software… But what good does “owning” a piece of software do you if you can’t get updates anyway? Back in the pre-internet era we got used to software existing as discrete versions but it hasn’t been like that for a LONG time. As soon as patching became a regular occurrence, “ownership” became a service contract with a CD attached. Then the CD vanished, and it just became a service.
While I do dislike needless “as a service” stuff, that model does genuinely suit a lot of people. It’s not a conjob; companies offer this stuff because a lot of customers want it. Most of the companies that are selling you SaaS stuff themselves use SaaS things in-house.
Yeah, it sucks to hear it, but this guy is right.
It’s also (typically) modeled in such a way that your software is consistently updated to new versions on release. You get active hotfixes, patches and improvements as they are released.
Most people jump software versions in stages of about 2-3 years. You’ll find a lot of SaaS packages will be priced as if you were instead purchasing the software at those stages.
All in all, if you have every intention of using the software regularly, it’s priced well and typically makes for a much better user experience.
Indeed. And that’s without considering that a lot of SaaS stuff on the consumer level lets you cancel at any time. Ok, you can get burned for 30 bucks if it turns out not to be all that useful, but the full packages are typically priced somewhere between eyewatering and “ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING?”, and they always have been.
A perfect example here - GeForce Now costs like 20 per month, cancel whenever you like. A 4080 gpu costs way over a grand. It’s up to you whether you prefer to own, rent or not bother at all, but it doesn’t take a lot to convince me to spend 20 bucks, but it does take a lot to get me to stump up for a whole new PC.
Can we not become subreddit by posting this shitty screenshots trying to justify our reasons? Just share your media and enjoy it.
what do you mean trying to justify? discussion of shitty anti consumer tactics in digital media is perfectly valid
A screenshot of some comment is not really discussion though. This is a pretty base level understanding of the concept, which is why I say it’s more cope then actual discussion.
This is one of the most popular posts this week here with more than 4 HUNDRED comments. I don’t know what you view as a discussion but I think this was a pretty successful attempt at creating one.
I will say this thread had way more discussion then I was expecting when I originally posted this. My point about the screenshot still stands, I would much prefer we discuss something new related to sharing media, instead of recycling the same discussion about why its justified to copyright infringe.
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I completely agree. However posts of a screenshot of some shitty comment very much screams cope. That’s what I say enjoy ya loot, cause the reasons don’t matter.
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I was gonna say the same thing but then I saw the 2200-something upvotes.
This community is doomed to be exactly like the low effort meme sub r/piracy if people keep upvoting this lazy content.
My headcanon is that it’s a passive form of protection: when copyright owners look to communities like piracy they are met with highly upvoted silly memes, which would cause them to miss the more helpful pirate advice mixed within.
I am stealing this line for future references
Our current system of copyright is flawed and only serves the interests of corporations.
To be completely frank, I couldn’t care less if it’s stealing or not. They should sell their shit for cheaper if their companies care so much, which I’m not sure they really do.
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If they do that how will they pay the artists millions of dollars… And how will they buy their latest private jet or yacht or whatever.
Most artists never make any money at all…
Well I’m talking about the ones that do. Don’t you think that it’s a bit unevenly distributed?
As an artist, where is my million dollars?
No offense. I’m talking about the ones that do.
The real piracy was the friends we made on the way.
And also the cargo ships I robbed.
The real friends were the piracy we undertook along the way.
Remember: friends come and go, but pirated media is forever (as long as you have good backups).
This is what I’ve been saying. We don’t even own digital products, all it takes is a server to be taken down or an account to be lost and all you bought is taken away. Pirating also can’t be stealing because we aren’t taking something away from someone else, other people are not deprived of the chance to have this just because we downloaded it.
Or the service is no longer supported. I remember buying some PS3 games digitally but can’t access them on my PS5. Load of BS.
I can’t play my Sega CD games on my PS5 either; difference is that I’m not complaining.
I assume you are referring to a physical copy of the Sega CD. As long as you still own a Sega CD you can play physical copies of games. Recently PlayStation closed down their online service for PS3 so you cannot access any digital games you may own even if you still have a PS3.
And there’s no other way to play those games. They’re pretty much gone forever alongside the money spent to purchase them.
I don’t think piracy needs to be justified because different people have different reasons.
Sure you could argue that you’re not actually stealing but creating/downloading a copy of something it already exist. I always found that anti piracy commercial “you wouldn’t steal a car” ridiculous as that’s not how piracy works.
For example, I do it because I don’t agree with how segmented the video streaming industry has become in recent years with this many different services that force you to buy a bunch of subscriptions while continuosly pulling content. Unlike the music streaming industry where all the most popular content (the majority of it) can be found on pretty much every serivce. You could have Spotify or Apple Music, not much difference (if any at all) in content or quality.
When I was a teenager I did it because I couldn’t afford to buy any sort of media content and options were limited. Pretty much everyone that owned an MP3 player was pirating music.
Here’s my justification:
I paid for a product. I’m getting that product, by hook or by crook.
The entire issue with these arguments, though, is that the opposition parties just answer those claims with “then you shouldn’t be ingesting that content”. If you aren’t willing to pay for it, then you don’t have the right to view/listen/stream it. Free market a-holes will always, correctly, bring up that the market works by putting out products and people paying for what they support and not paying for what they don’t support. The problem is that you can’t pick and choose which pieces or parts you support or don’t and there’s no way to give companies that type of feedback because they don’t care.
That’s a fine argument that they might have, but piracy still isn’t stealing. If someone steals something from me, I am deprived of that thing. If someone copies my intellectual property, I am hypothetically impacted by loss of income, but I can still use that information.
They can say it’s morally wrong for someone to use or copy information against the owners wishes or without paying. They are welcome to that argument. None of us are obligated to care about their opinion.
If they can claim customers don’t own something, especially physical items, after purchase because they are being pedantic over how people interact with intellectual property, we can and should absolutely use the same distinction to distance piracy fromt theft.
That’s a dishonest argument. You are stealing. It’s just not the media that you’re stealing. You’re stealing income from the creator.
Imagine there’s an amusement park ride that you want to go on. If you find a way to sneak onto the ride, are you “stealing” the ride? You’re not stealing the physical ride but you’re entitling yourself to the experience without paying the person who has to create, run, maintain, and sell that experience.
Digital content is the same way. You’re justifying it because, in today’s day and age, most content is provided by giant corporations and financial assholes but don’t pretend that you’re not harming the creators of said work and potentially keeping them from making a living. If we lived in a perfect world where everyone was honest, we would have all this content be free and people would pay for it if they enjoyed it and wanted more of it and they’d just refuse to pay for things they thought were shit. This insistence that you’re not stealing because you’re not stealing the vehicle of entertainment is stupid and dishonest, though.
Just admit you’re stealing and leave it at that. Attempting to justify the morality of it (or whatever you’re attempting to do here) just makes you look silly. You’re taking the “benefit” of the content without reciprocating.
That’s a dishonest argument. You are stealing. It’s just not the media that you’re stealing. You’re stealing income from the creator.
I don’t agree. I think your trying to compare this to wage theft, wherin an employee is promised or legally guaranteed some income based on hours work, where after both parties have agreed to this the employee has performed the work and the employer is withholding some of the pay. This case is stealing - the trade was completed and the employer is in possession of an asset (eg the pay that they are entitled to) - this is not a physical thing, but it is a real thing, with real physical value, and in removing that the employer would stealing that asset. Obviously there’s a garguntuam difference here because both parties had agreed to exchange assets and the employer has taken ownership of that pay per the agreement. If someone decided to do that same work, absent agreement, obviously they can’t claim wage theft because they didn’t have any entitlement.
To be intellectually honest, you’d compare piracy to plagiarism. But that’s (correctly) not as alarming as stealing which is why we need to mislead people to make it seem worse.
Imagine there’s an amusement park ride that you want to go on. If you find a way to sneak onto the ride, are you “stealing” the ride? You’re not stealing the physical ride but you’re entitling yourself to the experience without paying the person who has to create, run, maintain, and sell that experience.
Entering without permission (in your example, paying) is trespassing. It’s fine argument to say that it’s morally wrong and that you shouldn’t do it. It’s blatantly wrong to claim it is stealing.
Digital content is the same way. You’re justifying it because, in today’s day and age, most content is provided by giant corporations and financial assholes but don’t pretend that you’re not harming the creators of said work and potentially keeping them from making a living. If we lived in a perfect world where everyone was honest, we would have all this content be free and people would pay for it if they enjoyed it and wanted more of it and they’d just refuse to pay for things they thought were shit. This insistence that you’re not stealing because you’re not stealing the vehicle of entertainment is stupid and dishonest, though.
Digital content is the same way, insofar as piracy is more akin to trespassing than theft. It’s an abstract argument to say not buying something is harming owners or creators, who are you (or anyone else) to dictate what people buy, or to attach some morality to that?
You say it harms creators, but the evidence says that pirated games make more money. I imagine your claim is based on an assumption that people who pirate stuff do so at the expense of people buying it. Have you bothered to explore that assumption any further? You might be surprised.
Just admit you’re stealing and leave it at that. Attempting to justify the morality of it (or whatever you’re attempting to do here) just makes you look silly. You’re taking the “benefit” of the content without reciprocating.
Piracy is quite literally not stealing. Stealing is an act of removing something from another’s possession, into your own. That is simply not what piracy is, and trying to falsey equate different crimes is every but as absurd as “stop pretending driving 5mphover the limit isn’t murder, it’s wrong and trying to justify the morality of it makes you look silly”
No. I am not comparing to wage theft. You’re just making a semantic argument rather than a substantive argument. Sure, if you want to argue semantics, then I’m viewing it as trespassing or service theft. Either way, you’re depriving a creator of income. If it’s a smaller creator, then you’re stealing money from them because, otherwise, you wouldn’t get the experience of ingesting their content. You’re entitling yourself to the experience of ingesting their work without contributing to your end of the contract. You’re only making the argument in the way you are because larger studios pay the creators on a contract basis. The truth is, though, that those creators don’t get hired if their content doesn’t result in material sales (whether physical or digital) of the content. No one invests in content that doesn’t make money and the excuse that “it still does make money even if I pirate” is just mental gymnastics.
Your second argument is also dishonest - the “no one is losing any money because the person wouldn’t have paid for it anyways” argument. That’s just an extension of the second part of what I said above. If piracy is ok for one person, it has to be ok for all and if it was ok for all, then the content wouldn’t make money. TV shows don’t get renewed. Sequels don’t get made. Sure, maybe the original content made money because some people were honest and paid for it but you are depriving a creator of an income because, had everyone paid, they’d have more work and more income coming in.
All this is to say that I’m fine with piracy. Sometimes you can’t afford it. Sometimes it’s not available legally. Sometimes it’s just a superior experience where you’re not forced to watch ads or deal with DRM. These are all fine. But to try and justify it as deserved or go through these mental gymnastics to claim it’s not stealing is just nonsense or arguing semantics. Just admit you’re stealing/trespassing and not holding to your end of the contract and admit that you’re harming creators.
No. I am not comparing to wage theft
Then I’ll try a third time. My claim is that theft deprived the owner of their item. Piracy does not do this, ergo it is something different than theft.
My second argument is to preempt the inevitable “pure economic loss” claim. It’s a tangent, and is not a claim that 100% piracy is sustainable, simply that the assertion that piracy causes commercial products to fail (as piracy exists today) is factually and demonstrably wrong.
My third point, which you again chose not to address, is that equating piracy to theft is as stupid as comparing speeding to murder. They are different crimes and should be treated as such. You know what an actual comparison to theft is, which is the whole basis of the OP? A product a user has paid for being removed by the publisher because they chose to incorporate drm that is no longer sustainable, wonder why nobody calls this theft (in fact it is closer to theft than piracy). Oh wait no I don’t, I spelled it out in the first post - piracy = theft is propaganda to hurt the little guy, the big players are manipulating the system such that they are above the same laws we play by.
Be fine with piracy or don’t, I couldn’t give a shit either way. That is irrelevant to the points I’ve raised.
You’re still arguing semantics and not the substance of my position.
The issue isn’t whether the action is depriving the owner of the item. The issue is whether the author of the content is deprived of something, in this case income, when someone pirates that content. You cannot honestly claim that they are not deprived of something by piracy. Arguing that piracy and theft are different is just a semantic debate like saying that “murder” and “crime” are 2 different things because not all crimes result in someone being dead.
The second argument is a straw man. No one is discussing whether piracy causes failure. We’re only discussing the morality of depriving an author of income, whether directly or indirectly, and the needless justification being shown here which pretends that there is no effect.
The third point is another semantic argument and a straw man. No one compared murder to theft in any way to suggest that they are the same action. The only comparison of crimes that was made was a suggestion that, regardless of the crimes, two different ones can still have a deprivational effect. And why are you bringing up the DRM situation? I already said that was justified. It’s not theft because you’re not paying for the product, you’re paying for a license. Theft would be paying for a product and having that taken away from you. You bought the license knowing, in advance, that that’s what it was when you bought it. Ignorance is not an excuse for making claims that aren’t factually true.
Your entire response is irrelevant. You’re not addressing anything that was actually being discussed. Instead you’ve focused on the difference between piracy and theft as a semantic argument instead of a substantive one and continue to do so. The social contract for goods and services is that both parties are entitled to the “fruits” of their labor - one party creates and the other ingests and money is exchanged for a good/service. Piracy breaks that contract by allowing one party to ingest without providing the creator an equal good or service in exchange. The further entitlement on display here trying to justify this theft is childish.
I’m willing to pay for it, but I’m not allowed to do so
For example, Amazon/MGM still don’t allow me to pay to watch Stargate
Then you don’t get to ingest it. “I want it” isn’t any more of an argument than if it was a physical item.
For me, personally, piracy in this case is justified and can even serve as preservation of art. But to pretend that people are somehow entitled to it is childish.
Edit: If Stargate was the only thing you were pirating, you might have a point but let’s be honest… it’s not. People don’t pirate one show because they can’t watch and the subscribe to a piracy forum.
Then you don’t get to ingest it
Says who? You? MGM?
Says the “free market a-holes” I mentioned in the comment you replied to… In this case, they’re also right if we’re being honest and acknowledging that piracy is depriving the creator of income for their work.
I mean if I am not paying either way me ingesting that content or not makes 0 difference to the producer. It is the same logic as throwing excess food to the trash so homeless can’t eat it.
It does, though, by the argument they’re making. If you could only ingest it by paying for it, you’d have to have paid for it. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to.
The very fact that you’re watching it without paying kind of proves that point.
The producer and publisher paid a cost for you to have heard and develop an interest in their products. So yes, it makes a difference to them if that investment turns into you using the content but not paying for it. You’re suddenly a target audience without returns.
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It does matter though - The price paid to the creator was based on the prospect of X number of sales or Y numbers of adverts. Almost everyone who presently is trying to get their creative works seen is hoping that being seen helps them to “make it” and be able to write or sing or whatever as a full time job.
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He who pays the piper calls the tune. Don’t complain that modern media is garbage that doesn’t cater to you while also saying middle class soccer moms can sponsor everything.
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Says the guy not paying for shit that he’s still enjoying. What an entitled child.
Nonsense. It matters to the person who made it if they’re getting paid for it. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to watch it.
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That’s irrelevant. If everyone pirates the content, then that creator doesn’t get hired and paid again/anymore.
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So you’re entitled to do it just because everyone isn’t? What a crock of shit. What makes you special and exempt from what others have to do?
I’ve never understood the “piracy is morally acceptable” argument, personally. Best I can agree with is that piracy is not morally bad in some cases. Especially since me pirating something has no impact if I never would have paid for it in the first place. But it can often times be morally wrong (people who refuse to buy games from indie studios despite having the money to do so would usually fall into this category imo), and I can’t imagine any scenario outside of the preservation of media where it’s actually morally good to pirate things.
Like, I’m all for people not buying things that they don’t support. And I feel no sympathy for large companies that make more money in a day than I’ll make in a lifetime losing out on sales. But when did it become my right to play Hogwarts Legacy or watch a show without paying for it?
“If Rome possessed the power to feed everyone amply at no greater cost than that of Caesar’s own table, the people would sweep Caesar violently away if anyone were left to starve.”
- Eben Moglen
I think imposing artificial scarcity on art, information, and tools; and rationing based on those with the ability to pay is immoral. I mean sure, most art that people pirate is just empty entertainment. But imposing artificial scarcity on tools (software such as OSs, CAD, productivity software, etc), news, and academic papers behind expensive licenses that many cannot afford to pay is objectively immoral. If piracy did not exist, I am positive the world would be without many of the technological advances we have today.
Not to mention the fact that oftentimes pirated content is just better. DRM free games run better and some work people have put into remastering media in general is outstanding.
I found a collection of the DBZ anime which is color corrected, proper aspect ratio, higher resolution, improved audio (from a different home release with better audio) made by fans for no profit. Even if you wanted to you couldn’t purchase that but piracy made it possible.
Unofficial remasters of some old, poorly mastered songs have made a difference for me and I wouldn’t be able to enjoy them without resorting to piracy.
As a Muslim, it is already forbidden to implement artificial scarcity. So as a Muslim, it’s not an opinion, but objectively wrong, because God said that it is wrong.
Exactly. IP isn’t rivalrous like land or goods, so it has no place being artificially restricted. Property rights are a solution to human conflict in the natural world.
This is a pretty sorry justification. Just cut the shit and steak what you want, don’t blow smoke up our ass about segmentation.
Like segmentation isn’t an issue…
It is, but it doesn’t justify your actions.
To you perhaps, I’m perfectly fine with it.
galaxy brain
That’s my YouTube comment. You and so many others are making me feel like a badass. 😎
Unsure if anyone can clarify. But my understanding that simply downloading a watching isn’t an issue.
Selling illegally copied content is what can cause real legal issues.
I’m uncertain of any cases of anyone getting in trouble for simply watching copied content.
Example… 1st user pirates movies or videos and uploads them to YouTube or any streaming company.
2nd User then streams or downloads them to watch them offline. I’ve yet to see the 2nd user in this scenario face legal consequences.
Vs
2nd User then streams or downloads content and makes money off it. Here I see the 2nd user have legal issues.
Again I’m just a regular guy going based on regular guy logic.
Downloading and watching is a crime. One night be able to say they didn’t know what they were downloading but likely the file name and site or torrent is a good clue that’s bullshit.
Your probably discussing chance of getting caught. You likely will see a DMCA complaint or something like that to your ISP at worse for downloading but enough of these might get your service terminated (some ISP don’t care.)
Sharing the files and usually sharing a lot of files publicly or semi publicly will get you more attention and that will get the media companies more likely to take you down as a distributor.
VPN and smart browsing habits will reduce a lot of this risk though.
Think of downloading is one star in GTA. They will chase you if they are you. Uploading is two stars when they start shooting at you. Profiting of it is like three stars and that’s when they get more aggressive. You can get busted at one star but it’s just very unlikely.
Copyright infringement laws vary but even though simply downloading copyrighted material is against policies, it’s hard to enforce and most copyright holders don’t always find grounds for a lawsuit or it’s straight up not worth pursuing. You downloading a movie off a website is the same as a friend of yours sharing the same movie with you on a USB stick.
Actions against unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials (especially if it’s for profit) on the other hand are much more easily enforceable.
