Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

I am just going to buy from the actual bands when I buy music. If they do not have DIY from now on, I will just listen to something else. There are plenty of bands that do their own production.

Ef ethics in a world where greed is the norm imho.

Basically: should i care about ~~ethics~~ capitalist ideology?

No.

The system is literally genociding people, destroying the planet, etc. It's a major mistake to take their "ethics" seriously. It's just another grift. Enjoy the natural freedom of information while you still can.

Do what your ethics dictates. There is no right or wrong answers.

Support the creators who deserve support. Otherwise you will end up with nothing good to pirate, because all the creators who deserved support and made your favourite creations, starved to death (or got other jobs, effectively the same thing)

Your single act of piracy is not likely to make a difference either way, but on the other hand, your single act might indeed be the straw that breaks one particular camel's back. And collectively we have to take some responsibility for that. It's not even just about ethics (although it is ALSO about ethics), it's about self-interest. You can be an individual freerider if you want, but eventually the freeriders overwhelm the system and it shuts down.

Realistically there will always be plenty, plenty of games to pirate. But the key question is, will enough of those be good games, the really enjoyable ones that you want to play? The AAA slop and rehashes will never stop, oh they''ll churn and froth and lay people off and blame pirates but they're effectively self-sustaining, it takes money to make money and it takes money to lose money and there's enough money in the system to keep them churning out sequels and derivative "new IP" until the heath death of the universe. There will always be some good games to pirate and to play no matter what you do, no matter what we all do.

But it's not a binary condition whether our financial support or piracy matters. You vote with your dollars. Your dollars guide the AAA studios in their desperate chase to steal the dollars from us, and your dollars literally enable indie developers to continue their projects at all. If too many people are not rewarding the kinds of novel and well-made games they want to see from AAA studios, and not supporting people's passion projects that they've poured years of their lives into, you're not going to see as many novel and well-made games or passion projects like that happening, and odds are good that at least one of the ones you won't see happening will be one you really would have enjoyed.

Fr tho basically what /u/AnimalsDream said

Technically you rented that what you think you bought and when the licence expires the game,movie, etc. will be deleted from your library, best recent example is The Crew by Ubisoft and there was that whole debacle with Sony and their Discovery Channel licence where people lost a ton of documentaries, was later restored... mostly, but it showed how fragile this digital ecosystem is and why people turn to piracy eventually since you basically don't own anything you shouldn't feel guilty about it.

Do whatever you want I personally live in iran and I have a 160$ salary previously 300$ but snapback mechanism sanctions something something and 2 AAA games are 160$, also do not buy from key selling websites that harms the developers but piracy doesn't its the same as nobody buying

The US Supreme Court said it’s cool for LLMs to pirate shit for their garbage so it’s free game. Pirate everything. Support indie developers and artists though if you dug some of the stuff you pirated and have the means. I pirate manga all the time but still like having a lot of the physical copies so I end up doing that a lot even though they’re usually raking in money

Pirate anything you want, and buy from anyone you want to support.

You should only feel bad about pirating art made by small independent artists, and even then only if you don't have the disposable income to easily afford it.

Piracy is an actually victimless crime, you aren't depriving anyone of anything except your hypothetical dollars. And that's only a loss if you were going to spend them in the first place. Then add the fact that selling digital goods at all is basically a massive scam...

Also, in many cases it's actually better for the artist to donate directly to them than to buy their products from a store that's probably taking a cut.

As I've made more money in life, I pirate the same amount of stuff, basically (besides games). But I also spend a shitload of money on the stuff I like. Instead of paying Netflix or Spotify, I buy DVD/BD box sets, collector's editions, vinyl, bandcamp my favorite albums, and way too many concert tickets. Avoid the middleman and support the creator.

I used to only pirate things that I owned in different formats, (like owning a DVD, but wanting to watch it on my iPad), or planned on buying in the near future. But nowadays, it feels more like stealing from billionaires is a moral imperative.

You've conflated laws and ethics. Does piracy violate some laws in some jurisdictions? Unquestionably. Is every single law ethical? Unlikely.

It's not pirating if you bought it. That's just downloading.

When it comes to music I try to buy the stuff I like (mostly flacs) on bandcamp Fridays (certain days of the year where bandcamp charges 0% fees from the creators).

If it's indie/small/mid-sized creator I'd like to see more of. They also sell vinyl and other merch which is rly cool

Up to you. I'm comfortable with:

• buying smaller or indie games
• subscribing to lesser known / low profile / niche content creators
• pirating anything old, hard to buy, or incredibly popular (like people who make 100k+ per month on Patreon)
• avoiding AAA games altogether, with rare exceptions (those I usually buy, or they are F2P)

I'm also comfortable with pirating some content first and later buying/subscribing if I see I keep enjoying the content.

yeah its unethical to give corporations money and should be avoided whenever possible

I mean, they are just doing a global "exception" for AI training all together so why bother? The copyright law is not equally applied to everyone.

Whatever you want. Copyright was literally invented to steal from creators anyway.

Regardless of what conclusion you develop, some things are always morally acceptable to pirate. For example, Metallica.

/s

On a serious note, IP is a made up concept. Pirate away.

it depends.

I'm old enough to remember when PC demos were a thing and essentially if a demo didn't exist, the game likely wouldn't sell well. Hell there used to be entire websites that ONLY had demos for download of upcoming releases. So now game companies don't do demos anymore, I pirate the games as a demo. If it's something I think I'll play through and come back to in a month or two or even a year then I'll buy it. If it's an indie dev I'll buy it because I want to support them.

If it's something I'm no likely to finish or will finish and never pick it up again, high seas.

Music is different. I just soulseek everything. I'm not paying some crappy streaming service to then provide pennies to the artist. I can support artists I like via other means. Merch sales, going to concerts, etc that's where they get their money.

TV and movies? fuck em. I'm not paying for that crap when 9 times out of 10 something that I like is just going to get cancelled after 2 seasons. They don't need my money.

Books? nope, always pay for those.

Ha ha. I got your mass produced shit and i didnt pay for it, and then shared it with people so they dont waste their money.

And

Oh hey wanna buy that bluray for Toxic Avenger cause its a great movie?

Are 2 thoughts im completely fine with holding in my head.

That's a question for you, I don't think there is a universal answer for everyone.

Everything.

Like, i pay screenwriters by bringing them lunch while they collect cans around town and actors by tipping on lunch, but you, by paying at a movie theatre, generally do not.

Freely pirate everything without guilt. If you use torrent then seed how much you can. It will help your fellow human beings.

BUT if/when you have money to spare invest them into creators/art that bring you something. It seems antithetical because they taught us real art should be free from capitalism's shackles yadda yadda, but art and artists needs money to flourish. Find indie artists and wacky projects and fund them.

Pirate everything, and share as much as you're able.

pirate whatever you want, but just know that you're not voting with your dollar if you don't put your dollars anywhere.

it's really hard to make a living with a passion project these days.

you could buy music. and ethical/indie shit. books. things that you actually care about existing. or not, i guess. whatever

Only you can decide the answer to this question. If you aren't too busy preventing forest fires. /joke

That's a very ambiguous and loaded question.

do whatever you like nobody cares (no offense)

No need to make everything complicated

You can be the judge of that.

First of all: Decide a code of ethics for yourself.

(Piracy is equivalent to going to a book store and taking pictures of the books as you flip through pages. Ask yourself: Is this ethical?)

And if that's okay for you, then:

Second: If action is unlawful, weigh in on potential consequences and then ask yourself if you want to risk the consequences.

Piracy is not murder, cops would probably be too lazy to investigate.

I look at it this way, if I made a copy of this work irl would the person who made it go without their needs met? If I bought it IRL already then it is always fine IMO. If it is a independent person I try to buy it in a way that they get most or all the money and I get files that are not DRM. It really a case by case thing. Like I will never give Nintendo or Disney any money ever again so I have to find ways to get what I want most of the time it is second hand or pirating it.

I sail to find higher bitrate versions of things on the few streaming services I pay for. If I stream a show on Prime I don’t want to get a non-HDR or non-Dolby Digital version just because the platform got enshittifed since I signed up.

From my personal ethics standpoint, intellectual property is a form of private property which I'm against, also a form or artificial scarcity, which I'm also against.

If you want to support a small artist? You can maybe donate to them directly? Is that a thing? Maybe they have a patreon or something? In my case I have way less money than the artists I consume from so donating would make no sense.

Also, the act of making a copy doesn't remove the original, the artist doesn't get poorer because you pirate their content.

If buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing.

Bold move, asking a "should I pirate?" question in a community called Piracy. Surely you'll only receive unbiased answers here.

IMO if you cannot get it in a format that's appropriate it's warranted.

For example ebooks that only come with drm so you can't add it as an epub to your ereader.

I usually buy the book and then acquire the epub

The more you pirate the more hyped and disappointed you'll be about things you'd otherwise never have known about. It's a double edged blade. Your criteria grows. You spend less on highly advertised products and more on niche things most haven't heard of. But when pirating as an act of boycott you also risk growing attachment to the product or franchise you're pretending to sabotage. So if it sounds ethically correct to pirate something instead of purchasing it to harm someone in the production chain, don't do either. Most people will just preorder a collector's edition for another of their releases as soon as they forget or relax about what upset them. Piracy isn't theft, it's generosity, accessibility and preservation.

1. If X was not available to pirate, would you pay for it?
2. If you would not have paid for X, does pirating X cause any actual loss to its owner? If you would not have paid for it either way (even if that were the only option) and you haven't caused them a loss of revenue by pirating it, did you impact the creator at all?

The counter to this is always that just because someone wouldn’t pay doesn’t mean the creator’s work has no value. To that I would yes that is completely true. The creator's work has value, but maybe not monetary value. You can't always conflate value to money (ex. FOSS, canonical sci-fi lore, protest symbols, etc).

There is also a morality component used against my argument that would say I'm ignoring the intent, consent, and ownership the creator has. Its usually worded that I'm using outcome-based morality and that the ends always justifies the means by that logic. But I pay for X, not for access to use X. If the creator can opt without my consent to remove X from me, I'm not longer obligated to follow that moral constraint. Morality is a two-way street.

i would love to have a dvd collection of my faves but they're like nah we dont want to make them anymore so now im just like fine i'll just download :)