Asklemmy

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

My time is more valuable than money, but I still pirate. To me it's not about money but principles.
If I pay for something and still can't "own" it, I pirate.
If a generous portion of the money I pay isn't going to the rightful individuals but to our corporate overlords, I pirate.
If my internet freedom is threatened, I pirate.

If someone pirates due to lack of money and one day they have enough, I suggest keep pirating and donate to FOSS and pay to individual creators.

I pirate to seed to y'all in need

Do you?

Yes

Do you justify?

No

Philosophy?

Mood

I pirate all media I consume and seed terabytes of pirated media every month, proudly. Fuck capitalism, that's my justification.

No, I don't, because I can afford stuff and pirating in this situation would be just pure stealing which I believe is morally wrong. Yes, being a billionaire is usually morally wrong too but I don't think it just cancels out.

Justifying piracy by saying capitalism is bad sounds like a hypocrisy to me. You want to use something that exists thanks to capitalism without participating in it. You want to eat your cake and have it too.

Now, the case is different for people that can't afford stuff, especially when they genuinely need it (but I don't draw the line at entertainment, after all people NEED entertainment too). In that case, please pirate away. Everyone deserves a decent life. In general, I largely agree with OP's friend.

I can afford to buy or subscribe to services but at this point streaming is just more annoying than pirating. With pirating I can use my favorite player (mpv), maximize video quality (high quality blu-ray rips), watch offline, no bugs or buffering, instant seeking et.c. As for games I might pirate a game before buying it but usually I just buy it since it's convenient (unless it has intrusive DRM).

I want the stuff so I get the stuff.

Easiest way to obtain media is to pirate, so I pirate it. But also because I hate copyright and patent laws.

yes

1. copyright is a deeply flawed system invented by capitalists with moronic consequences for well-intentioned artists today
2. i regularly support musicians i like through bandcamp (especially on bandcamp fridays where they get 100% of the money)
3. i usually do not pirate indie things (but remember that if your only options are piracy or “key reseller” sites, ALWAYS pirate. you are actively costing the devs money if you buy a stolen key from a reseller (and they are all stolen))
4. i’m poor and adobe can choke on my balls

Do I pirate? Yes.

My philosophy? I don't wanna pay for it.

Honestly, with the exception of abandonware that can't legally be bought anywhere, piracy can't be legitimately excused. If you do it, you do it because you want something that you should pay for, but don't wanna. Which is a choice you can make, I won't hate you for it, but own that instead of pretending that you have a logical moral argument to getting it.

Every company that owns media or copy protected information has one goal. To bleed consumers dry of as much money as possible. They lobby governments against our interests, track our data, and destroy the integrity of the product that they are selling to accomplish this.

For everything that I am interested in, I seek the best experience. I want the media I consume to be available, convenient, and unaltered. If I can pay a reasonable fee for that then I will. If not then I will seek other means. I am tired of corporations fighting to change culture and expectations to be "more profitable" rather than delivering a product that consumers actually want. I will continue to vote with my dollars (or lack there of) until this practice changes (which will likely be never).

Yes. If I could purchase what I get from piracy (media files with no DRM that I can use as I see fit) for a reasonable price I would do so. Unfortunately this is not a thing and even the compromise of being able to stream doesn't work because all the media companies have decided they need their own services and even then not everything is available. Piracy is just way more convenient.

Back when Netflix was actually decent I actually did stop pirating tv and movies for the most part because there was enough content on there to keep me entertained. Eventually I had to unsubscribe though because it got to the point there was nothing on there I wanted to watch.

If unemployed: Pirate EVERYTHING.

If employed: Pirate EVERYTHING (excluding: indie games)

If I didn't pirate everything, I wouldn't buy it anyway because I don't have money.
I do not purchase any digital content.
If I like some movies enough, I will purchase them on DVD. I like to have something physical.
I'd do likewise with games, if I played any. If it's just download, I am not purchasing it. If it comes on disc/cartridge, sure.

Exception to this is FOSS. FOSS is almost always free in cost, but if possible, I'll donate on it. It is the only digital content I am willing to pay for. That is because it has the chance to benefit other projects. And if I'll ever learn programming, potentially even some of my own.

The antifeature of DRM anyone? Wanting open source that you can keep running, up to date and secure, as long as you want?

I get almost all literature for my papers from libgen and scihub. I even have access to a lot or journals through my uni's VPN, but it's just much simpler and quicker to use the open seas.

My justification is that a) scientific journal publishers are evil and a scourge on humankind, and b) on average, I only need like 1% of the info in such literature, so I would never buy it anyway, which means that me pirating it doesn't affect sales in any way.

If I don't have access to a paid version of it, I'll pirate it. It's not like you're losing a potential sale if I literally can't give you my money.

If I disagree with the ethics/philosophy of a company (i.e. Disney) I'll pirate it. They may make good movies but I'll not support them financially.

If it's too damn difficult to find an accessible version of it, I'll pirate it. I'm fine with paying for shit, but not spending an hour of my free time just trying to give you my money.

I pirate when it's literally less effort than buying. This mostly applies to E-books. Also I pirate a lot of shows and movies because fuck subscribing to 10 different streaming services.

I live in a country where the government doesn't really care about piracy so I pirated a lot of things in my life.

Before the whole "streaming wars" I actually stopped pirating shoes and movies because Netflix was much more convenient. But nowadays every service has 1 or 2 things that I want to watch or sometimes it just gets removed from the platform so pirating became more convenient somehow.

Books on the other hand are kinda different. I prefer physical books but I live in a non English speaking country so when a new book comes out and I want to read it I have two choices either hope that some publisher translates it even then the translation sucks most of the time or just pirate it.

I don't pirate indie games. Other games depends on the company.

So my philosophy is: If I couldn't pirate this, would I ignore it or buy it? If it's the latter I buy it, if it's the former I pirate it. Basically if the creator (or distributor or whatever) isn't gonna benefit either way might as well enjoy it. I also exclusively pirate anime because the way streaming currently works is a mess.

I'm very casual for a pirate.

If I can't afford it or I believe it's ridiculously overpriced (cough, adobe cough cough), or if I am against some stupid client that phones home and sucks resources (again cough cough adob..) then I'll pirate it.

If I can't purchase it because it's nowhere available for sale, say, some 90s series in such and such language- pirate.

Finally, if I'm curious about something but not feeling comitted, I'll pirate first then see if I buy.

I don't justify any of this. I just do.

Because streaming services are either slow at releasing new episode or the service isn't available at my region. (Restrictions they put themselves, not my countries government)

They don't want my money :(

I directly support artists that I like. I pirate absolutely anything and everything without a care. I do not respect the concept of intellectual property. It is economic perversion to make scarce an infinite resource. May the copyright régime perish.

I pay for free stuff (FOSS services etc), and pirate paid stuff. Feel right somehow, can't explain why exactly.

For me, it's simple. I generally stick to A/V media for any of the Linux ISOs I download.

It simply comes down to this: is there a simple, and affordable way for me to watch what I want? If so, do it.

For music, I just have a subscription to my music service of choice. For me that's YouTube music (formerly Google Play music); but it could just as easily be apple music or Spotify or tidal.... they all have 99% of all music, so the provider I go with will service all my needs for less than $20/mo. With ytm, I can also share the service with family, without really any additional cost. Within limits, of course.

For TV/movies, everything is splintered between more than a handful of services, each charging ~$15/mo or more. So to get access to everything, I would need to pay more than $100/mo.

Yo ho ho me maties. That's not simple, nor cheap. Yarrrr.

Give me a single website to go to, that gives me a single reasonable fee that I can then access everything on paramount+, HBO Max, Netflix, Hulu, Disney+.... (You get the idea)... and I'll hang up my hat for good. Since that's never going to happen, I'll just be over here, sharpening my hook.

I pirate music to archive it. I use youtube revanced to listen to music but the songs just disappear from my playlists with no way to know what dissapeared, spotify is nice but I still like to keep my music locally.

I pirate movies to also keep them, I don't have a DVD player so paying just for digital copies where ownership is questionable seems not worth it. Better to pirate and have it forever then to buy it and lose is it due to changes in policy or regional blocking. Streaming services are just not worth it, small roster of movies so you have to use different services for each movie. So simply not even worth the hassle

I pirate most book, finding books I want in English is not possible and the best alternative is amazon which I'd rather not feed money.

For games I have basic rules:

1. Indie games are mostly offlimits, I'd rather support the studio (I might pirate indie games to see if I like them, since most don't have demos but I would buy them if I liked them)

2. Pirating bigger games I look at the developer and publisher. I pirate games made or published by companies I don't like, for examle: EA (generally disliked for squeezing every ounce of profit out of games, too many micro-transactions) or blizzard/activion(Sexual harassment allegations, corporate greed). No need to support such companies just take what they make while they're here.

Publishers can also ruin games, look at how deep silver betrayed metro fans and signed and exclusive contract with epic last minute.

As lord Gaben did say, piracy is just an issue of convenience but I would like to also add the factor of security of keeping them.

My piracy preference revolves around that convinience tops all. Spotify has all the music I listen to, so I subscribe to it. Netflix doesn't have the shows I want to watch, so I make a Jellyfin server that auto downloads all the stuff I'm planning to watch. Steam has most of the games I would want without much restrictions, so I buy games there. I want no interruptions from the content I want to use, and stuff like ads, content unavailability, geoblocks are a big no for me.

I can't find any logically consistent way too label piracy as immoral. It doesn't remove the original and it's just creating virtually free copies. It's the definition of a victimless crime.

The fact that you're hypothetically removing profit from the creator only becomes a moral issue if that loss of profit is A) guaranteed, that is, the recipient of the free copy would definitely have paid for it otherwise, and B) is significant enough to impact their life negatively. And the latter happening is much more an indictment of the system that demands people justify their existence through the extraction of profit than it is of the consumers who are just copying a few bytes.

The idea of paying more than a few cents for any digital media is frankly absurd. It's highway robbery that we're paying the same amount to rent a copy of a movie as to buy a pound of meat or a gallon of gas. It's 99% just blatant price gouging.

I don't pirate, but generally, I don't pay for digital goods either. I'm mostly not a fan of how digital goods are tied to corporate platforms, which could disappear or make changes I don't enjoy. For some digital goods, you can fully download them and back them up to a hard-drive, but I just don't care enough to do that, when I can use FOSS software and Creative Commons songs, e-books etc..

Most of the time, I view piracy as a last resort. I'll try to legally obtain it, but there are circumstances when I do sail the seas:

1. Textbooks. This is a all around greedy industry preying on poor college students like me that barely pays the actual authors. They don't deserve my money, and I don't have much of it anyways.

2. Video games/books I already own. I already paid for it, so it's justifies to me.

3. Old video games that don't have a real platform that I emulate. I understand that I shouldn't pirate a 2021 video game, but a 2001 video game that I can't legally buy on PC/phone is a different matter.

4. Aforementioned skimming through books. I might buy it after doing that.

5. Music. Why? Half the stuff I listen to isn't even on Spotify or other streaming platforms. Additionally, I can manage my own library, listen offline without having to follow the whims of a streaming app, and even change the pitch and speed of the music!

In this post they asked what one considers ethical piracy, and this is how I commented:

Calling it ethical is a higher bar than calling it ethically acceptable. Ethically acceptable is a higher bar than practically acceptable.

If you are factually incapable of getting it otherwise, it is ethically acceptable. If, at the same time, you need the material, it is ethical.

Without the need and unavailability or unavailability, I would always be careful about calling it ethical - I would not call it ethical.

In those cases it is at least subjective and a weighing of various morals, costs, need or desire, and practicality. (By pirating you are a beneficiary without supporting the thing - which one should at least be aware of and weigh.)

I often don't consume what I don't deem a reasonable price for a reasonable offering. I occasionally (or maybe rarely?) buy music on Bandcamp because I can download and own it in high quality. For movies and series, there is no such thing, which is a requirement for me to pay. So I don't buy or rent individual movies and series at all. (Bundled streaming can be a reasonable offering. It's not about individual products then.) Overall I buy videogames for reasonable prices, to a higher degree than I play (or even can play) them. When it's a good or great price for something that interests me, looks good, and I want to support, I buy it. Software has many free and open source software available - so I don't see a need to anything in that regard.

I just want a service that's better than Netflix/Amazon/Disney/Spotify can offer. I want all my media in one place. I want access to it even if the internet is down. Segmentation of media across all the platforms is bullshit and it drives me wild. I'm getting less than what I paid for when Netflix was the only game in town. It's worse and less than what it used to, so why bother paying them.

I pirate everything I consume.

I do believe artists should be paid for what they create, so I still purchase music even if I've already pirated it. The artists get more money from me than they would have if I just streamed on Spotify. I think it's a win-win for me and the artists.

I do not pirate. I occasionally like to go out to sea, but I feel like spending long stretches of time out there would suck. I'd get sunburnt, I would eat like shit, my ship would probably not have decent internet access... like, there are so many cons, and I probably would make less money doing that than I am as an attorney. Not a great career path.

I do download movies I want to watch if I can't find them streaming. But I don't do anything that I'd call "piracy."

Intellectual property isn't real, it's a self-contradicting concept. Thus, it is impossible to steal it, just like it's impossible to poach a unicorn. If you had the magical ability to point to an object and clone it, that wouldn't be stealing either.

I only pirate things from large corpos. I don't pirate stuff from indie developers or small artists. I usually buy some merch from them too so they get some extra money, I try hard to support the little folks.

There are rare times where I feel that big time developers deserve my money, like No Man's Sky. Indie devs that made it huge, screwed their fans when the game dropped initially, but have redeemed themselves fully by being honest, transparent, and providing incredible value since their flop to their customers.

I bought their game even though I don't really play it, just to show my support of a game Dev studio that truly cares about their players and product.

TL;DR support the small-time folks, screw the corpos.

There is no such thing as piracy (in this context). No such thing as "intellectual property". There are only copyright, trademark, and patent. And I violate them like a Thanksgiving Turkey.

As a fledgeling author, I could only be so lucky and actually get my poor excuse for work pirated: free publicity and a sure way to reach another potential reader ~~market~~ public.

Yes I pirate everything.

I don't really understand the justification question. What is there to be justified? I'm not hurting or harming anyone.

Supporting content creators by paying for access is just idiocy.

It's a bit like disabling your ad blocker to pay content creators by viewing ads - happy to let idiots do that on my behalf.