Well, my friend, he’s kinda poor he can’t afford some books and some streaming services, so he pirates. He pirate books, audiobook and videos and other stuff. Sometimes he buys books he likes a lot out of loyalty to the author (yeah, I don’t understand it either), he likes to read physical books, but yeah, if he hates the author or just wants to skim through it, he will download the book.
He usually doesn’t like to pirate from small companies or professors who are trying to make a living by selling books, but from millionaires & plenty of mega corps which already have loads of money, he feels like it’s the right move to pirate
Also, have you ever noticed that you have felt that the value of a product has decreased just because you didn’t pay for it, thus you are less interested to read it? i.e., had you paid for the book, you would have more likely read that book.
He says he will buy stuff when his time is more valuable than money, let’s all hope that day is soon.
What are your piracy habits?
I pirate content that is not in print within my region. Fan subs of Japanese TV shows, emulated games for discontinued consoles, things like that.
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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).
There’s even some things you can do with a self-hosted media server that you just can’t easily do with sreaaming services. For example, Jellyfin has a group sync feature where multiple users can join a group and when someone plays something, it plays for everyone. It works great for watching shows with friends remotely. I think Amazon Prime video has something like this but none of the others IIRC.
Even for 1080p media, playing locally with advanced denoising and upscaling to 4k is so nice, and of course just not having to deal with all the streaming caveats.
For games pirating it for performance testing is useful before you know you’ll fully commit to it, although Steam let’s you play for up to 2 hours and still get a refund, a lot of games will require you to play more of it to make that decision (looking at you, Starfield… I’m glad I didn’t buy that one).
I agree with holding off on Starfield. Bethesda games are usually instant buys for me but this time I’ll probably wait years before buying it. My love for Bethesda games is all about exploration and for some reason they replaced handcrafted story-filled landscapes with procedural generated ones? Hopefully modders make some cool content that is worth exploring in the future :)
At the risk of going off topic a bit, I am very confident that there will be a plethora of new areas with loads of content coming from modders as soon as the Creation Kit drops. With Skyrim, adding new areas was often slightly awkward because you had to make it a dungeon that would then maybe lead to a bigger, open area simply because the Skyrim “overworld” was relatively crowded already and it would easily risk breaking other mods that added stuff on the main area. But in Starfield there is so much empty space on the three dimensional galaxy map that it’s virtually impossible that two distinct modders would choose the same exact spot for their custom solar system.
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Me? No! I wouldn’t…
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When I was a broke-ass college student I pirated a lot of things. When I started working properly and finally had my own means, I started buying basically everything. Then the post-covid world brought a lot of changed to my life and income and I’m a little back on the piracy train.
There’s a lot of factors, for me. If I want to support a product, I won’t pirate it. I recently picked up Sea of Stars, because it’s a small team indie title made with love, and it shows. Likewise, if I am on the fence about something for some reason, I may “demo” it first and if it keeps my attention, I’ll end up buying it.
Sometimes there’s past experiences that keep me off of some games. I strictly won’t buy Ubisoft’s PC releases, and haven’t played an Assassin’s Creed game in years because of that. After every debacle with them, between uPlay, account issues and the performance/quality of their PC ports, they just don’t deserve my money.
Working minimum wage or struggling with money for any reason shall not mean you cannot have nice things in life, never. So I do the thing. Sometimes. Normalizing spending money into things you physically cannot touch is one thing i could get over with, like buying GOG (DRM free) games i’ll actually end up playing, but licenses to play a dang video game that is valid for god knows how long? This is where I draw the line.
Your friend is right: when them corpos suck us dry, we gotta suck em back. It is easy as that.
Furthermore: It’s not piracy when paying for it is not owning it.
I pay for my audiobook streaming because it doesn’t cost so much and you cannot pirate the books I listen to anyway
I feel good seeing how the corpos squirm when trying their damndest to get rid of any pirating method (which is fair and what everyone in the world deserves free of charge by birth) only to be met with impossible tasks and fall flat on their faces. It’s one of the better feelings in this world. I pirate everything, everywhere, unless I know I can help a talented (and actual) human out.
Man, what an echo chamber of anti-corporation and anti-copyright sentiments. I pirate myself, because the services for tv/movies are not convenient, but I don’t delude myself into thinking it’s somehow justified. If I could get any movie or series on demand like spotify I wouldn’t pirate (if I could afford it). I fail to see how anything else would be ethical to the creators of the content.
The creators of the content are only one part of the equation. There are also the funders and distributors of content, and the consumers of content, all of whom have an ethical stake in this. The DMCA is a prime example of something created through lobbying by the funders and distributors that harms the consumers. In the unfortunate landscape surrounding intellectual property that we live in, I think it is far more delusional to believe that pirating is unethical. I would far rather live in a world where that wasn’t the case, this just doesn’t happen to be one.
Yeah, good point. It’s not a clear-cut black and white issue after all, and currently absolutely tilted towards the lobbyists/big media
Yes, I pirate. But I don’t justify it. 🤷♂️
I want it, I don’t want to pay for it, I can get it free.
I pirate a ton of stuff, but I also see more movies in theaters than most people I know. I’m lucky enough to live in a place that still has an awesome local video store that has a ton of hard to find, obacure films. Like shaw brothers kung fu films, or documentaries like Jefftowne.
I don’t own a ship but if I did you best believe I would find a crew and use it to raid billionaire yachts while torrenting copyrighted material.
