Basically: should i care about ethics?
IMO support indie creators when you can. Aside from that, ahoy!
If buying isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t stealing.
Piracy isn’t stealing regardless.
Stealing is to deprive someone of something they posses.
It’s not possible to possess something that doesn’t exist yet. Your copy doesn’t exist until you make it (by downloading the file).
If you chose to not support creators by paying to copy thier work, that’s maybe unethical but it’s not stealing.
If you hack into a Sony server and copy an unreleased film, then delete their copy, that is maybe stealing. Anything short of that is just copying.
Everything.
Piracy is a tool to help reduce the disparity in wealth.
The only time you should buy something that you could pirate is if you can’t find it and you plan on sharing it with everyone else. I call this “taking one for the team.”
Pirate what you need unless you are one of them archiver preppers.
This ain’t about “legality” this is about fighting the class war against owner class.
Do what you want. No need to overthink things!
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.
preach.
do whatever you like nobody cares (no offense)
No need to make everything complicated
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.
The amount of games/movies I’ve purchased AFTER pirating them is pretty high
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.
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.
I like to think about ethics. I still pirate some random stuff here and there, but one thing I like to do is make sure I’m getting some money to the creators of what I’m enjoying, skipping the middle man as much as can be.
this is mostly only relevant with music, but if I can buy an album or song directly from the artist, that’s awesome. it not, i try to five what service benefits them most.
Bold move, asking a “should I pirate?” question in a community called Piracy. Surely you’ll only receive unbiased answers here.
Bias is inevitable.
It makes no sense to work to eliminate it.
It’s like trying to breed a new species of humans that are void of preferences. An impossible task. If such a breeding process somehow succeded, the resulting product would not be a human anyway.
If anyone claims to be unbiased themselves, or claims freedom from bias for someone else, even just implying that someone somewhere is unbiased, I immediately know bullshit is afoot. Such claims are not always knowingly malicious, but are always detrimental to my interests should I start foolishly believing them.
I generally make sure to spend my money one contemporary artists or authors (who are not already filthy rich, if they are already super well-off i dont contribute to increasing that wealth and instead buy something else) and try to maxmize the amount of money that falls to them. You could also find ways to donate directly to these artists and then pirate their stuff to your hearts content (from my ethical point of view anwyay, law will not agree with me). Ive also first pirated stuff and then bought it later and just replaced the files on my media server.
I dont really care about big corporations or some random rights holder long after someones death. So any big studio movie or old rock bands get pirated.
Personally, I think it depends. For me, I like to pirate games that there’s no way for me to legally buy a copy of and if possible are way too overpriced. Think multi hundred dollar retro games.
For media, I would absolutely support buying used media second hand. New physical releases tend to be worse than they were in the past in my opinion, so second hand or piracy feels like a good enough deal to me.
For music, I’d rather have physical CDs, if possible, rather than paying for streaming because I at least either support a local business I like to go to for CDs or support the artist directly. Laws be damned, I’d rather pirate music than give my money to the companies who financially abuse artists. Similar reason why almost all my CDs are second hand.
For stuff I have legally purchased, if need be I can just pirate them if it’s a digital product. Otherwise I can back up disc based media I have. No idea how to do it for the Sega Genesis cartridges I have, though, so if need be I can pirate those as well.
Edit:
For games, I pirate games I don’t own. For digital games I could find on Steam, I use it as a sort of demo for the game because majority of games don’t have a demo and I need one to ensure I’m not throwing my money down the drain.
There have been plenty of games I’ve bought because the “demo” was enough to make me wanna buy the game to support the devs. Latest example being Dungeon Clawlers.
You do you.
I try to stick to Indy games and pay for them. I have d+ nf Hulu atv and cable with all channels that aren’t premium. I keep copies of any series/movies I like. If they lose the license or drop anything I’m not losing it. VCR rules, I paid to play it, I can record it/torrent to get it.
Stuff that’s not on the air anymore, of I can’t stream it paying that much, also not gonna feel bad about torrenting.
Qwest network had a commercial in 99.
Guy pulls up to a dirty motel in the middle of nowhere
“What kind of rooms you got?” “King size.”
“You got room service?” “Donuts and coffee.”
“Got entertainment?”
“All rooms have every movie ever made in any language, anytime, day or night.”
By now we should have that for a couple hundred a month. Definitely for less than I’m paying for all those services. Wanna put a limit on that? Everything over 6 months old is on it. But there’s no reason outside of massive greed to get to the state of fracture where at with service provision.
I have apple Music and Spotify, I’m also keeping copies of music.
Books are a mix, I pay for new audiobooks from authors I like, I buy hardback for newish stuff I really like,
Old stuff, classics, textbooks, stuff with the rights going to an estate I pirate.
More or less, I want to pay a reasonable price that I can bear to make sure my authors in studios actors keep making new stuff. If the fat cats eat it all, I’m not giving them more.
