Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

The article is well written and all, but that "Copyright © 2023, all rights reserved" at the end is ultimate hypocrisy.

Agree 100% and I've been seeing this "debate" in other instances and communities recently

Piracy is moral and ethical. Small businesses are not the targets. I would download a car, I would download a better life if I could

I'm not going to argue for/against the article. However,

we need laws and policies promoting open access and sharing of knowledge, not maximizing profits through contrived scarcity

As a fan of FOSS (and the Open Source community in general), I completely agree with this. Sharing knowledge can do a lot of good.

Copyright has evolved from a limited monopoly on a work of a handful of years, into an entitlement which has diverged sharply from the original intent of the law. It's time to bring the law back into balance with its intentions of promoting the creation of new works, while granting the public free access to those works after a reasonable time. Lifetime plus seventy years is not reasonable.

Edited to add - consider the number of great artists whose works never commercially benefited them. Not because of "piracy", but because their work was not known or recognized. Still, they made their great works because they were compelled to do so by their existence.

Hard to argue against piracy with the current system of copyright that only serves giant corporations. Guess it's human nature to try to consolidate power...

Ironically, for old stuff at least, Piracy is the only way it's reliably preserved. Even if you do want to buy it new to support the creators, oft-times you can't. It's because I can't buy it that I turn to piracy. Not just for old games, but sometimes old comics and manga too. Occasionally Anime that's no longer licensed or available.

Plus, it's only going to get worse now, with Streaming services and online platforms delisting anything even that might not make a profit because they don't want to pay residuals. I'm not big on pirating new releases, but that's because I think we should support artists. I also think we should call for the creators to be paid more of the profit share vs. the money people at the top who seem to do nothing but fire people and shoot down good ideas to try to make everything the same carbon copy live service.

I also don't have to pirate new stuff, because it'll old stuff on sale at half price (or less) soon enough, and with all the bugs fixed and the features added the way it should have been at launch. My backlog is so huge that I won't have time to go through it anyway before I die. So there's another reason I don't care much about new games. If I'm still interested in them a year or more later when they're on sale and fixed up, I'll buy it then.

As for stuff like Anime and Manga. Anime subscriptions are surprisingly cheap, and so are monthly manga subs if you know where to look. Viz's Shounen Jump ($3) Vizmanga ($2), Azuki.co ($5), Mangamo (also $5 last I checked)... so long as you only subscribe to one at a time and rotate, you'll probably never run out, and it's a lot cheaper than buying it one volume at a time $10 each or whatever.

I wholeheartedly agree when it comes to education. But when it comes to entertainment, to me that becomes more morally ambiguous, especially if the content is new.