Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

When I don't want to give money to a specific company that I dislike. EA is an example.

When you are a student and cannot obtain a reasonably priced copy of software- as a company I would see this as a sure fire way to onboard a new generation into my product which will then be paid for with company money later on.

I stopped going to cinema when the Hollywood movie cartel started messing with freedom on the internet, and I don't feel any remorse pirating Hollywood movies.

When I started earning enough to have disposable income, I made sure to buy ebooks and audiobooks, as well as supporting my favourite musicians on Bandcamp or by buying merch.

I can't really trust that a game is worth the price tag anymore. So I treat piracy as a extended demo. If I feel the fun to price ratio is solid I'll buy the game.

Downloading a copy of media or software is just a copy. You can make infinite copies, and you're not taking anything away from the creator for copying it.

Thus all piracy is ethical.

I believe online piracy is the uploading part, not the downloading. I think uploading has a much more narrow use case, but if everyone stopped we wouldn't be able to download.

When I can't buy it in a reasonable way lol

Simply wanting to save money is a valid enough reason to pirate. The only time you should have any second thoughts is if its a product you REALLY want to see more of or if its made by a smaller group that could really use that money.

Even then though, you can always help without spending money. Easiest way is to spread the word.

You enjoyed that game?

Tell others its a good game worth getting. In many cases, that might help more than buying the game and saying nothing about it.

There is no value in spending money anymore, you used to get some long term benefits. You bought movies, music and games for example and got to use them however long you want to. Now you pay significantly more under the guise of: "it's only x amount per month" and own nothing.

For me, something like Spotify is far too expensive, considering i could buy an album from the discount bin for like €2 and play it for a full year until i got slightly bored (you still owned and got to use it after that). Spotify is €11 a month, times 12 compared to a single €2 permanent purchase. I usually only bought one or 2 albums per year.

I'm not saying you need to agree with this, but for me it makes absolutely no sense to pay this much especially when i look at my wage not going up and the cost of living having doubled over the past few years.

It's a tautology.

There was a television show from another country that I wanted to watch. It wasn't available to stream in my country from the source, and wasn't available on any other streaming platforms. I even tried making an account, but they wouldn't accept my credit card because of the billing address.

Pirating that would be justified; the argument isn't just that, if I can't buy it then I should be allowed to take it, but that if I can take it without causing financial stress on the artists, then it's OK. They are refusing my money, so pirating it wouldn't deprive them of a sale.

I also strongly agree with what others have said, that my ethics require me to purchase something once.

Where I get fuzzy is on the right for producers (studios and distributors) to make profit. Money going to artists is clear to me; and production studios need to fund projects, some if which will fail. But the existing, purely profits-driven, risk-averse, homogenizing movie production industry... I'm not sure I agree that they deserve the lion's share of the profits.