Basically: should i care about ethics?
do whatever you like nobody cares (no offense)
No need to make everything complicated
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
Fr tho basically what /u/AnimalsDream said
For the authorities: Definitely not the second.
fr fr, I’d shoplift too if it weren’t that easy to get caught
it depends.
I’m old enough to remember when PC demos were a thing and essentially if a demo didn’t exist, the game likely wouldn’t sell well. Hell there used to be entire websites that ONLY had demos for download of upcoming releases. So now game companies don’t do demos anymore, I pirate the games as a demo. If it’s something I think I’ll play through and come back to in a month or two or even a year then I’ll buy it. If it’s an indie dev I’ll buy it because I want to support them.
If it’s something I’m no likely to finish or will finish and never pick it up again, high seas.
Music is different. I just soulseek everything. I’m not paying some crappy streaming service to then provide pennies to the artist. I can support artists I like via other means. Merch sales, going to concerts, etc that’s where they get their money.
TV and movies? fuck em. I’m not paying for that crap when 9 times out of 10 something that I like is just going to get cancelled after 2 seasons. They don’t need my money.
Books? nope, always pay for those.
Ethics are very important to me so I say always support worker owned companies/ small indie teams, always support books, but never support evil mega corps like Amazon, Disney, EA, Activision, etc.
Also, any company that has donated to the Republican neo-fascist party? Fuck them. If you wouldn’t give money to Putin then you should never ever give money to anyone who will give that money to Putin’s puppets (conservatives)
The US Supreme Court said it’s cool for LLMs to pirate shit for their garbage so it’s free game. Pirate everything. Support indie developers and artists though if you dug some of the stuff you pirated and have the means. I pirate manga all the time but still like having a lot of the physical copies so I end up doing that a lot even though they’re usually raking in money
I mean, they are just doing a global “exception” for AI training all together so why bother? The copyright law is not equally applied to everyone.
Pirate anything you want, and buy from anyone you want to support.
The more you pirate the more hyped and disappointed you’ll be about things you’d otherwise never have known about. It’s a double edged blade. Your criteria grows. You spend less on highly advertised products and more on niche things most haven’t heard of. But when pirating as an act of boycott you also risk growing attachment to the product or franchise you’re pretending to sabotage. So if it sounds ethically correct to pirate something instead of purchasing it to harm someone in the production chain, don’t do either. Most people will just preorder a collector’s edition for another of their releases as soon as they forget or relax about what upset them. Piracy isn’t theft, it’s generosity, accessibility and preservation.
i would love to have a dvd collection of my faves but they’re like nah we dont want to make them anymore so now im just like fine i’ll just download :)