Whatever you need to tell yourself to sleep at night. It's definitely stealing. This is a piracy community. Don't feign moral superiority. They offer a product, you don't want to buy the product so you find it for free elsewhere. A digital file that you experience for a cost is no different than a book you buy from a store, regardless of the state of ownership after the fact. And regardless if it's a locally published author or a multi billion dollar studio, there's a cost of entry. Semantics is all you're arguing, not the legitimacy of piracy, when you share that copypasta.

[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 35 points 9 months ago (6 children)

In this case, the phrase's become more popular because people buy digital goods and, due to business shenanigans, they lose access to it, like buying a digital copy of a movie, "owning it", then no longer being able to access it because Sony couldn't be arsed to get the rights sorted out.

There's also the numerous situations where you can't legally own media, simply because it's not up for sale, like the vast majority of content on streaming sites. There's no way to own and consume some media except through the provider. It's still illegal, it's still an unauthorized copy, but in this case, it's the only way to "own" something.

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