I’ll go straight to the point:
- Piracy is useful to bypass regional frontiers and access to censored content
- Piracy is helpful to watch content without supporting it if you consider it not worth of it
- Piracy might be helpful for content preservation and survival
- Piracy is useful to ACTUALLY evaluate whether to spend money on some digital content or not
- Piracy is sometimes the only way to actually own DRM-protected content
Piracy is moral as long as it doesn’t hurt actual people, corporations don’t count
Most people working on big media productions (movies, shows, games) get a fixed price or salary for doing so. The owners / publishers (maybe also big stars in movies which already are millionaires) get all of the rest when a production sells good.
So by buying / paying for subscription services you only support big c-suite assholes which sit on the rights to media which they have contributed nothing to, except for capital maybe. I won’t pay some intransparent big corporation to be able to watch a 10 year old movie / show just to make those people richer.
Piracy is not immoral, but if it’s too widespread it can destroy opportunities for people creating things to get paid for creating things, and so they may not be able to continue doing so. And that just makes the world worse.
Try to find a way to support the people that make stuff that you love. For example I won’t pirate music from small bands, I only pirate games if they have onerous DRM or something (never indie games), and I’ll only pirate books if they’re ridiculously overpriced and I can’t get a standalone DRM free version.
Just cos you’re a pirate doesn’t mean you can’t have morals.
Can you even buy ebooks these days without going though Amazon? Aside from an incredibly small amount of indie authors (who probably got kicked from Amazon for unknowingly pissing off some algorithm) there’s no place to download them and support the authors.
There’s another one: access to media while in poverty
This is basically why I do it. I can’t afford streaming services, especially since you need multiple these days. I used to just use Netflix back when it was a good option. It was cheap and good enough to be worth it.
If I didn’t pirate it, I wouldn’t be able to consume it at all at this point, it’s that simple.
But despite my own self being in poverty, most of the people I know are not, so by talking to them about the media I watched free, and getting them to consume it as well, it increases the chances of the company profiting anyway. Just not off me.
These companies think they are losing out on money due to piracy, but they aren’t. They just assume we’d all pay for it if we didn’t have a choice. They don’t seem to realize sometimes it’s about not being able to pay, not just not wanting to pay. There’s no additional money to be had from a lot of us.
Not this again. This discussion was spammed on Reddit continuously, there’s no need to.
Everyone has their own opinion on it. You’re on pirate community, we all pirate. That’s it.
Piracy is unmet consumer demand. - Gaben
Honestly it’s also back to being a price thing for me… Shit’s out of control, “sales” are $30 for a 5 year old game.
It seems like since the pandemic everyone and everything is raising prices and somehow they all have a reason, yet my pay stays the same…
Access to media that companies arbitrarily remove to cut costs in their billion dollar company.
Access to media since companies refuse to put out physical versions now in the age of streaming.
