If something is not for sale, I have no qualms about pirating it. Disney vault, abandonware, obsolete versions, etc.
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Nowadays, not a whole lot. I have more money than I have media consumption time, no matter the type. There are still exceptions for situations where nobody wants my money, where I also feel that even calling it a form of "theft" is a bit rich simply because... what potential sale or income is being lost? Nobody wants to make money with it! I'd happily pay, it's just that there's no one there to receive the money!
I pirate a lot of movies and series and also a few books.
I also sometimes pirate games but not as often
I don't justify it. I think it's a bad thing but I like cheap.
I tend to pirate and then buy later, when cheaper. Or for streaming services, I'll download a show as it airs but then purchase the service and background the series later to add viewership.
I think of it as time shifting the sale price.
I was 14 and just got a cable modem when Napster came out. I just got introduced to modern music, had no way to pay for it other than asking my folks. Let's jump on the pirate ship!
Now I'll let you do the math on my age, I have very stable income, and a fair amount of disposable savings, and I still pirate pretty much my ears will be hearing. Plex has equal or better tools for watching/listening than every other service I've tried (shuffling episodes is my favorite)
I go to concerts, watch movies in the theatre, read physical books and support creatives in other ways.. so I feel different about that..
I also started noticing this when itunes came out. You could only listen to music YOU PAID FOR on devices you've authorized. Then soon after I saw this, a friend was down on his luck but had a very good and varied cd collection. He started selling them to second hand shops and his friends.
I ended up seeing this dichotomy and thought to myself.... this sucks. Let's just pirate it..
I should note the amount of physical unread books I have on my shell are similarly rationed to the amount of music I haven't listened to or movies I haven't watched yet that I've also pirated
Your friend's situation brings up the question of ownership. Do you actually own a persistent thing if you can't later sell it and pass ownership to someone else?
I think media companies want to ideally have us think of their products as candy bars, we buy it and consume it. If we want that experience again, we have to buy another. They want us to buy the opportunity to read, look, listen every single time, or buy a pass that gives access for a limited time.
But a lot of us consider media like a personal, well loved library or museum. We buy books and things in order to revisit again and again. We replace or repair if worn out. If it's one of a kind, we take actions to safeguard it. We search for rare and unique things and acquire from other private collectors if it's no longer publicly available. The value of our collections increase if the media stops being published and goes out of circulation.
But these entities would rather see everyone's personally owned copy spontaneously combust just because they didn't want to sell it anymore. And it's what they have done to digitally sold and DRM'd media, or by deleting from streaming services while also cutting the creators off from being able distribute independently.
We are at a major crossroads as to what ownership and ongoing availability and access means. Piracy is currently a failsafe until property can be safely bought and protected - for the purchasers.
People that pirate shows and movies don't do it necessarily because they can't afford to pay for it or want to "stick it" to the corporations. They pirate because they're human and humans get a level of joy from not getting caught doing something they're not supposed to be doing. I may be experiencing a level of joy right now but won't confirm nor deny it here.
I'm not gonna pay $200 just to play an old pokemon game. I do buy other games at my local shop though.
I pirate things because it's free and easy. My actions are not intended to serve any greater cause. There are some things I pay for out of convenience: pirated video games typically mean no official servers; Android apps are better managed automatically by the Google Play store.
About the only thing I pirate these days is stuff that isn't available to legally pay for in my country.
I used to quite a bit, for random, hard to find songs. I also did it to get in digital format, what I owned on vinyl. A few older classic movies here and there. I canβt remember the last time I pirated anything, but I still use torrents for bootleg concerts.
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 just do whatever's easiest -- just signing up for some of these services takes way too long to watch one 2 hour program. The money's not an issue at all in my mind, im happy to pay $70 for baldurs gate 3 with a dedicated download server and installation package. But im not willing to spend half an hour downloading and installing some streaming service.
My relevant philosophy, if that's the right word, is linked to on my Lemmy bio. Written more than a year ago, it's still defaulted to. Someone on Lemmy told me it's the most socialist-esque thing they've ever seen from me.
I don't care about copyrights, and although I'd agree that I'm not entitled to someone else's work, I'll counterfeit it without a single qualm. I'm poor and would rather not have to choose between being well fed but bored as death, or hungry but entertained/educated. As much as possible, I try to support the little guys though; concretely, I'll eventually buy a game made by Octavi Navarro or Unspeakable Pixels, but Activision won't ever receive a kopeck from me.
I used to pirate a lot more when I couldn't afford to fill my media desires. Nowadays I'm a bit more principalled, I'm not paying collector prices for old super Nintendo games for instance. That shit gets emulated and if I've already bought a game on console, especially if I bought a standard and "complete" edition, I'll likely piratd a PC copy for modding and the like.
Though sometimes a piece of art is created by a morally bankrupt company and while I typically just ignore the things they produce, sometimes I really want to try it, so I pirate it.
for legal reasons, I don't pirate anything.. but a friend told me that piracy is more convenient, and that it has more benefits (like, retain 'ownership' of content without annoying DRM)
train of thought (legal): what streaming service do I need to subscribe to to watch this? okay lemme go grab my wallet and sign up for an account
train of thought (piracy): click download
if companies don't want you to pirate their media, they should make it more convenient and flexible to purchase legally. adding DRM and making things subscription-only will push more people towards piracy.
If only there was a service like Steam for movies & TV.
I pirate media only, not games. Simply because I don't want to risk getting malware. Also too cheap to bother with streaming services; I want to own my media.
It's only piracy if you grab a cutlass and storm the local shops. It's time to call it what it is = digital theft / running unlicensed software / whatever. If someone hacks into your accounts, I doubt you'd call them a pirate for stealing all you personal videos and pictures, taking over your steam account, 'borrowing' your netflix, and so on. The whole thing is deeply uncool.
Personally I wish the laws would change to make copyright non-transferable from the original artists, who deserve reward for their efforts but shouldn't be a meal ticket for others. I'd also like to see abandonware legitimised - if folk can't buy it then it should be fair game.
I pretty much only pirate content that's not readily available in my countrys streaming services.
I'm not the pirate I once was when it comes to gaming but there's always EGS exclusives, games whose lack of regional pricing make them impossible to reasonably buy here, things like that. I'm a patient gamer for the most part so most of the time I can just get it a few years down the line but sometimes even that doesn't cut it. I avoid doing it to indie developers, but those are usually the few that follow Steam's recommended pricing guidelines so they tend to be fine anyway.
I pirate unbelievable amounts of tv and movies on a regular basis though through the *arr apps and whatnot, mostly because I refuse to pay for a dozen different streaming services with their rotating content and usually terrible apps. I self host whatever I can to avoid relying on the whims of a few corporations, and the one surviving service so far is Spotify.