Well, my friend, he’s kinda poor he can’t afford some books and some streaming services, so he pirates. He pirate books, audiobook and videos and other stuff. Sometimes he buys books he likes a lot out of loyalty to the author (yeah, I don’t understand it either), he likes to read physical books, but yeah, if he hates the author or just wants to skim through it, he will download the book.
He usually doesn’t like to pirate from small companies or professors who are trying to make a living by selling books, but from millionaires & plenty of mega corps which already have loads of money, he feels like it’s the right move to pirate
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.
He says he will buy stuff when his time is more valuable than money, let’s all hope that day is soon.
What are your piracy habits?
I don’t have an answer to your exact question but I want to emphasize…
NOTHING in the history of humankind has ever existed like computer data. A 100% identical copy of videos, pictures, and music can be made almost instantly at what is essentially zero cost to the original holder of the data. Any comparison to “stealing” or to a physical object (a car lol) just falls flat because the situation is just so different.
Practically speaking, the world we live in, with computers everywhere, cheap storage, and easy fast internet access for so much of the world, has only been around for about two decades, maybe three. NOTHING like this has ever existed before, and businesses, culture, and laws have been very slow to catch up.
I’m not saying pirating is right or wrong, just that the whole idea is still so new that society hasn’t caught up to it yet.
In Babylon Alexandria, docking ships were required to surrender any and all written materials to the library. There, scribes would make a copy of everything that was submitted.
The originals of the documents were stored in the library and the copies were given back to the ships.
First instance of intellectual property piracy?
First instance of intellectual property piracy?
Perhaps, but of course there are still significant differences.
To make these copies you needed a team of highly skilled scribes and their accoutrements, and the ship had to wait in port for several days.
That is to say, these copies in babylon would have come at a significant cost.
I thought that was Alexandria?
Yes. You are correct and I am a dumbass.
NOTHING in the history of humankind has ever existed like computer data. A 100% identical copy of videos, pictures, and music can be made almost instantly at what is essentially zero cost to the original holder of the data. Any comparison to “stealing” or to a physical object (a car lol) just falls flat because the situation is just so different.
YES!
Nice comment, tq!
Removed by mod
thats a super copey way to say you pirate and dont see it as wrong. digital or not its still a product so the rules are the same.
of course the rule being pirate from big companies and try to not pirate indie stuff (unless ur a poor college student)
i pirate all my games and movies generally but i would pay if i liked a game a lot. but piracy is bad for the sole reason of if everyone pirated hypothetically then digital content would likely cease to exist which would also be bad. or maybe not if ur amish
Digital content wouldn’t cease to exist, it just wouldn’t be able to be monetised.
The content would once again be made by the people who are passionate about those projects, and not about the greedy shareholders that want mediocre content just enough to get people to pay for it and line their own pockets.
Give me a reasonably priced, accessible way to enjoy the content and I will happily pay for it.
Streaming has become untenable and now it’s neither affordable nor convenient to watch what I want to watch. And with how frequently shows and movies bounce around platforms, who knows if the show I want to watch this weekend will be still available on one if the many platforms I’ve been paying for.
I’m just done with it.
I know people like to shit on Spotify. But it’s the reason I stopped pirating music forever ago and the reason I’ve paid for it for years now.
It’s fairly reasonably priced at $10-11/mo. It’s available on basically any phone, computer, tablet, etc. And nearly every song I could ever want to listen to is just there, seamlessly. You can even download the songs to play locally for when you don’t have Internet access. I will admit there are some rare occasions where a song I want is not available there, but it’s so infrequent that it doesn’t at all impact my listening experience. I can also very easily discover new music by generating playlists based on a song I like.
Now look at something like Netflix. It used to be this way…priced well and had everything you could ever want to watch on it. But now everyone and their mother has their own steaming platform. It’s absolutely ridiculous. It’s become as expensive as cable to get the same watching experience as TV streaming sites used to be. Sure there are people who say “well I just periodically subscribe and unsubscribe to the service I want to make it cheaper”. And sure, it makes it cheaper, but it sure as hell isn’t convenient. I don’t want to have to fuck with all that shit. So I use illegal TV/movie streaming sites instead. Or I just watch YouTube videos or use free services like Tubi and Pluto. Paid for TV streaming services absolutely suck ass nowadays.
If we started having issues with artist and production company fragmentation, I would cancel my Spotify subscription. But thankfully that hasn’t happened and I hope it never does. The trend doesn’t seem to be looking that way thank goodness.
If you have a reasonably priced service that has everything I could want, I pay for it. If you don’t, then I pirate. Simple as that.
The biggest issue to me is that all music services offer effectively the same access to music. I’m not choosing between Spotify and YouTube music because my favorite artist is on one, but not the other. However we are conditioned to think this is ok when it comes to video. Streaming services never should have been content creators, we should be choosing Netflix vs Hulu based on price, app quality, video quality.
I was never conditioned to think it was ok for video and it’s why I hate TV/movie streaming services lol
I still pirate my music, using YouTube music revanced, but the main reason I do it is because I find it to expensive for how often I use it. I don’t use it that often, mainly just when cooking dinner, if there was a way for me to use YouTube music for $5 a month, I would probably pay for it.
Also for me it has to be YouTube music, as alot of the songs I listen to aren’t on other platforms, (song covers, and remixes).
I’m with you. I’ve had a Spotify sub for more than a decade and have no plans to cancel.
192kbps max and now artists and corpos can pay to promote music on the front page.
No thx
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This is how I do it.
I pay for Netflix, Prime (only really for the free shipping), Disney+, Apple TV+ and Spotify, if it’s not on any of these then I’m going to pirate it.
The whole exclusivity stuff is just rubbish, I get the reasoning but if you can’t make your content easily accessible then I just don’t want to pay for it.
Exactly. Anything predatory to humanity deserves to be fucked with in whatever way we can.
All culture belongs to everyone, therefore should be accessible to everyone.
The sale of goods only concerns those who can and want to afford it.
Sharing is not theft.
Pirates are cool.
Well said. The world is unequal and the rich in 1st world countries still try to milk the 3rd world no matter what, mercilessly. We just repay in kind. 😃
My philosphy is Buy what you can afford, pirate the rest
Dito. Mob Psycho is awesome, but if i want to buy all 3 seasons in HD i’d spending more than 100€ (on Blu-Ray). This is nothing but ridiculous.
I don’t pirate music or games because there are reasonable platforms and pricing models which make pirating more hassle than it’s worth. Shows and movies, on the other hand, are an absolute shitshow to purchase legally.
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Outrageous pricing.
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Declining quality. Especially writing. See Rings of Power, Wheel of Time, and Foundation.
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Content is often unavailable to purchase. See Disney vault.
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Competing streaming services. I’d have to subscribe to six services to access the shows I like.
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Content disappears from services with little notice.
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Studios and platforms have been removing and modifying older content for political reasons.
It’s like they’re trying to make the experience as bad as possible. So fuck ‘em. Thank you Sonarr and Radarr.
I don’t pirate music … because there are reasonable platforms and pricing models which make pirating more hassle than it’s worth.
Hopefully Spotify is not the platform you’re talking about. I don’t use them because they do not pay the artists. Bandcamp is the spot for music… It’s really the only place I get music anymore.
I don’t use Spotify, but no one forces artists to list their music on Spotify. They can choose list on any platform they like. FYI Spotify does in fact pay artists. Just less than Bandcamp. Streaming is why I don’t pirate anymore. If I had to go back to paying $30 for an album I’d be a pirate again. So artists can take some of my money, or none of it.
I love band camp. I love having FLAC downloads
It makes me so mad that company’s edit or change original movies or books for politcal or because it hurts somebody’s feelings. The movie/book was written or produced in a time period that was very different and its ugly to try to change history. If you don’t teach about the ugly things in history they are doomed to repeat themselfs
I’ll add to that.
Shit is geo-locked to certain countries and I can’t access it. 🏴☠️ Raise it.
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You know how writers get paid fuck all for the movies they write? You know how animators are paid criminally low wages for the anime they produce? At the end of the day for most media it’s the companies that get all the money, not the artists. Therefore, fuck them, I am pirating your content not contributing to your profit margins.
I only pirate TVs/Movies. Streaming is in such a shitty state that I don’t want to figure out what service is on what, and I’m certainly not going to subscribe for just one thing to watch. I feel no remorse.
I cannot confirm, nor deny.
But, I will say, once upon a time, before the days of netflix, if you wanted to watch things, you needed to spend a fuckload of money, to watch it on cable, with commercials every 10 minutes… or, you drove to a blockbuster. So, you either did that, or you obtained the movie/tv/etc, via a torrent.
Then, netflix came along, gave you a ton of content, at a reasonable price. And- then, there wasn’t really much of an advantage to obtaining media via other alternative means. So, netflix took over by storm, and piracy went way down.
Then, everyone wanted a piece of the action. So, then Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney Plus, HBO+, ESPN+, (And insert 50 other network-specific streaming services) jumped into the fray. Then, they all made exclusive streaming contracts. So, if you watch a handful of things, you would need a handful of streaming service subscriptions.
And- again, the alternative option of piracy, became the better option, as you can watch whatever the f- you want, WHENever you want, without having to pay for 50 different subscriptions every month, just to watch a TV series, which they decide to cancel after the 2nd season.
Do you justify?
If the fucking scumbags didn’t get greedy in the first place, we wouldn’t be in this situation. But, no, everyone wanted an extremely generous piece of the pie, and now everything has went to shit again. Fuck those guys. Isn’t like the actual actors/writers staring in movies gets any of the money anyways.
If there was a service I could pay like $100-200/mo for and just have every movie and TV show I’d happily pay for it. It doesn’t exist, but pirate sites do and they do have every movie and TV show, including tons completely unavailable on any streaming service
GabeN got it right, piracy is a service issue. I haven’t pirated a PC game in probably 12 years because steam works great and has basically every PC game I could ask for.
I pirate to seed to y’all in need
I pirate all media I consume and seed terabytes of pirated media every month, proudly. Fuck capitalism, that’s my justification.
Do you?
Yes
Do you justify?
No
Philosophy?
Mood
My justification: nobody has stopped me yet🤷
My justification: nobody has stopped me yet🤷
I can sense angry Germans staring at your comment
What happens when a German vists a piracy site:
https://www.der-postillon.com/2023/09/wuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh.html
Waldorf Frommer is eagerly reading too.
Yeah, RIP German piracy community. Always a huge PITA to find German movies online. I wasn’t aware one company is driving most of those lawsuits though, what a wild story. Can’t fault them for finding a great business model though
I had to write a research report in university about whether or not piracy hurt or helped the recording industry.
From the research, I found multiple studies that compared brain activity of shoplifters compared to those of pirates. The area of the brain that lit up when stealing physical objects did NOT light up for those who pirated.
Digital piracy is not theft. No one is hurt except for unrealized revenue. But if someone pirates, was that even potential revenue to begin with?
It was also found that piracy allowed for greater reach of content which statistically resulted in more people attending live concerts (think of piracy as free advertisement). Concert attendance led to increase in ticket and merchandise sales.
So overall? Piracy is good. It is only bad if you ignore multiple factors and only focus on short term bottom lines. A net positive.
This holds true for music, but what about other forms of media like books, games, and movies which don’t tend to see the same kind of revenue streams resulting from free advertising?
If I pirate a movie, for example, it might be because I didn’t want to go to the theater and now my wife and I can both not buy a ticket and watch from home. I guess I could see how some big studio games could benefit through merchandising in the long run but if your game doesn’t have merch or any other revenue streams then what?
For books, if I torrent something and find I really like the author, I’m more inclined to pay for another book in the series of another book by the same author. Same concept as music. Physically having a book in your library is worth a cost.
For games, one may buy a sequel or another in the series or recommend the game to a friend who would then go and buy it. Steam and other game services make it much less attractive to torrent than to buy it at a discount. Achievements, social network aspect, and such make buying a game come with other intangible benefits.
For movies, same concept applies. If the movie is in a series and the new one comes out, one may be more inclined to pay for it or see it in theatres or recommend it to someone else who will pay for it.
Of course in these scenarios, it’s totally possible that none of this happens and the content is acquired for free and that’s it. But when you scale these possibilities up by larger numbers of people, the chances are much higher that additional revenue will be made in the long term as a result.
We also need to keep in mind that piracy has its own high barrier for entry. The majority of the population do not have the technical skills to be able to successfully pirate content so we need to remember that when we think about all of this, we’re looking at a relatively small subset of the population.
For games, there’s a tendency that if a game is truely good and the developer is not being a greedy little shit, that people may buy the game. People talk about it doing it all the time, and on rare occasion small devs will play this for visibility.
I found some if my favorites by pirateing it and then buying it later because I loved the game.
