Asklemmy

i enjoy stealing

for legal reasons, I don't pirate anything.. but a friend told me that piracy is more convenient, and that it has more benefits (like, retain 'ownership' of content without annoying DRM)

train of thought (legal): what streaming service do I need to subscribe to to watch this? okay lemme go grab my wallet and sign up for an account

train of thought (piracy): click download

if companies don't want you to pirate their media, they should make it more convenient and flexible to purchase legally. adding DRM and making things subscription-only will push more people towards piracy.

You cannot steal what is not physical. Theft implies removing a physical object from somewhere, creating a loss of an item.

Digital information is 1s and 0s, and you just create a copy. You do not remove the original one. There is no theft taking place.

The value of a product does not go down because I didn't pay for it. If anything, if it's a quality product, the value goes up. If I pirate something and enjoy it, chances are I will pay for it when I can afford to. If I pirate something and don't enjoy it, well, I wasn't going to buy the product anyway so there's no loss. Let's say I watch a movie at a friend's house and absolutely hate it. I do not buy the movie. How is that different than pirating it and coming to the same conclusion? I see the movie without paying money.

If you're gonna do it, do it, but don't pretend like you're morally right in doing it. For the vast majority of us, we're pirating something we don't need but something we want. Is it hard to acquire? Does it come tied to annoying subscriptions? Does it come from a company you don't like? Is it too expensive? None of these are valid reasons to pirate something because you could just as well enjoy other media that are available to you. Or if you are out of accessible media to you, you could just not enjoy media. Be bored. You're not entitled to access to the things you're pirating.

Don't get me wrong, I understand you, and I empathize. I pirate too, when something I want falls under the conditions I listed above, but I'm under no illusion that it's ethical in some way. There's no ethical consumption under capitalism? Well there's no ethical piracy either. People put work into something and if you use it, you should pay what they ask for it.

I know this is an unpopular opinion, because no one wants to be the bad guy. Pirate if you want to pirate, your reasons are yours, but be honest about it. You pirated something because you wanted it, and you didn't want to not get it, and you didn't want to pay the entry price either. It is what it is.

I don't believe in intellectual property. I will pirate anything I want to use and release everything I make for free.

I pirate media only, not games. Simply because I don't want to risk getting malware. Also too cheap to bother with streaming services; I want to own my media.

I do, movies and TV shows. Occasionally books, but I buy them much more often than I do pirate. When I was in my teens and early 20s I also pirated games, but I'm too lazy to do that anymore. Movies and TV shows are too fucking expensive for the value they provide. I also pay for a few streaming services, so I only pirate stuff that isn't there.

Also, have you ever noticed that you have felt that the value of a product has decreased just because you didn't pay for it, thus you are less interested to read it? i.e., had you paid for the book, you would have more likely read that book.

Not really, with books and movies I only buy/download when I want to watch/read. With games I buy a lot more than I play, but I don't pirate those, so it's not relevant.

It's only piracy if you grab a cutlass and storm the local shops. It's time to call it what it is = digital theft / running unlicensed software / whatever. If someone hacks into your accounts, I doubt you'd call them a pirate for stealing all you personal videos and pictures, taking over your steam account, 'borrowing' your netflix, and so on. The whole thing is deeply uncool.

Personally I wish the laws would change to make copyright non-transferable from the original artists, who deserve reward for their efforts but shouldn't be a meal ticket for others. I'd also like to see abandonware legitimised - if folk can't buy it then it should be fair game.

Sometimes he buys books he likes a lot out of loyalty to the author

Your friend is pretty damn cool. I personally pirate whatever I feel like and then buy the stuff I like and want to support. I used to avoid pirating indie games then I realized I bought more indie games when I pirated them first to see if I enjoyed them.

I pretty much only pirate content that's not readily available in my countrys streaming services.

I'm not the pirate I once was when it comes to gaming but there's always EGS exclusives, games whose lack of regional pricing make them impossible to reasonably buy here, things like that. I'm a patient gamer for the most part so most of the time I can just get it a few years down the line but sometimes even that doesn't cut it. I avoid doing it to indie developers, but those are usually the few that follow Steam's recommended pricing guidelines so they tend to be fine anyway.
I pirate unbelievable amounts of tv and movies on a regular basis though through the *arr apps and whatnot, mostly because I refuse to pay for a dozen different streaming services with their rotating content and usually terrible apps. I self host whatever I can to avoid relying on the whims of a few corporations, and the one surviving service so far is Spotify.

I don't care about copyrights, and although I'd agree that I'm not entitled to someone else's work, I'll counterfeit it without a single qualm. I'm poor and would rather not have to choose between being well fed but bored as death, or hungry but entertained/educated. As much as possible, I try to support the little guys though; concretely, I'll eventually buy a game made by Octavi Navarro or Unspeakable Pixels, but Activision won't ever receive a kopeck from me.

People that pirate shows and movies don't do it necessarily because they can't afford to pay for it or want to "stick it" to the corporations. They pirate because they're human and humans get a level of joy from not getting caught doing something they're not supposed to be doing. I may be experiencing a level of joy right now but won't confirm nor deny it here.

I pay for my audiobook streaming because it doesn't cost so much and you cannot pirate the books I listen to anyway

I used to pirate like crazy in my youth. Now since Steam and Netflix I don't pirate, recognizing that creators deserve to get paid and also by paying them that supports making more content.

Generally stuff like Steam games I'll pay for, especially now that I can afford it. I have no qualms with people pirating things if they can't afford it, like teens, students, between jobs, on social security, people living in a country with an undervalued currency. To me it's not stealing, it's expanded access to knowledge, and unlike stealing benefits companies who get much better reach and recommendation than if the price tag (or stupid DRM) stopped them from trying.

When I do pirate something, I often treat it as a demo, like I can play the game to get the feel but no/limited networking features, no updates etc.. I don't like having to pay and refund something if I was just going to try it out. If a friend wants an idea of how a game is like, I give them a copy I bought after removing DRM if I can. Often times they go and buy their own copy because it's a cool game, when they don't it probably wasn't interesting enough to complete.

Sometimes there are just too many middlemen taking a cut here and there that I would rather obtain something in contravention of copyright then provide value back to the creator more directly if I could. Steam, a rare exception for me, justifies their value through their robust update, social, modding, Linux supporting ecosystem.

When I was a broke-ass college student I pirated a lot of things. When I started working properly and finally had my own means, I started buying basically everything. Then the post-covid world brought a lot of changed to my life and income and I'm a little back on the piracy train.

There's a lot of factors, for me. If I want to support a product, I won't pirate it. I recently picked up Sea of Stars, because it's a small team indie title made with love, and it shows. Likewise, if I am on the fence about something for some reason, I may "demo" it first and if it keeps my attention, I'll end up buying it.

Sometimes there's past experiences that keep me off of some games. I strictly won't buy Ubisoft's PC releases, and haven't played an Assassin's Creed game in years because of that. After every debacle with them, between uPlay, account issues and the performance/quality of their PC ports, they just don't deserve my money.

Man, what an echo chamber of anti-corporation and anti-copyright sentiments. I pirate myself, because the services for tv/movies are not convenient, but I don't delude myself into thinking it's somehow justified. If I could get any movie or series on demand like spotify I wouldn't pirate (if I could afford it). I fail to see how anything else would be ethical to the creators of the content.

I think pirates are cool but the download links they put to make you download viruses are not cool