this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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There are lots of reasons to pirate stuff, but this argument in particular boils down to "We should steal stuff now because maybe some day in the future I won't be able to use the paid version after they go out of business." And that is shitty.
You bought it, so go crack it now that the license check is broken and nobody will care. That's GOOD piracy. Support the creators, pirate when you can't or it's unreasonable to pay (more).
Don't just pirate to mitigate theoretical future inconvenience. Do it to circumvent actual inconvenience, or to get things you couldn't otherwise afford, or to say "fuck you" to big, shitty companies.
But pirating from a small-time dev just in case there are maybe license problems far in the future is not The Way
Yeah, I agree with you completely, indeed I just posted this as in a meme manner.
I love FKM and I paid for it even when it was clear the app wasn't going to be updated that much, I usually don't feel any kind of remorse while pirating, but now this is justified and that is good too.
Regardless this is a good reminder that this can happen anytime with any app or service, being a good or a bad one, having nice or asshole devs/teams behind, and for that piracy will always be a handy solution, I just wish that abandoned apps could somehow being open sourced automatically, but that is a dream.
okay but if that's your purpose then there's no problem with purchasing and pirating at the same time.
Absolutely. I do that regularly. Purchase to support the creators, pirate to meet some specific use case.
like I've had more than one super good YouTube video essay go missing, getting permanently pulled because of some copyright issue with a background shot or something, so I'll actually add really good YouTube videos to my Plex library just in case as well
Totally. Though, that case can be a tiny bit tricky. Like, people should be allowed to remove stuff from the Internet that they've created if they want, but it should also be okay to archive content that may be abandoned or lost. Hard to create rules that differentiate the two effectively for enforcement
the specific ones I'm talking about, they were removed by YouTube and not at the creators behest. like one of them is about the three stooges and whoever owns The Three stooges material complained about some copyrighted material in the background horse shit
Sure I'm just thinking about how you'd write a law or policy that accommodated both reasonable scenarios
well it's a really interesting concept. there's really no other form of media where you could put something out there and then recall it somehow. like if you wrote a book that you didn't like, there's absolutely no legal way you could prevent people from reading it, etc. sort of ties into the Barbra Streisand effect
What's interesting with the comparison to books is that you can stop it from being published. You can't force people to give up the copy they already bought, but they can't make more copies and distribute it.
Hard to draw that distinction in the digital world
And if you want a better comparison, though of YouTube like a drive-in theater. You're not allowed to make a copy of the film with your camcorder and go distribute it.