Basically: should i care about ethics?
If buying isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t stealing.
Everything.
Piracy is a tool to help reduce the disparity in wealth.
The only time you should buy something that you could pirate is if you can’t find it and you plan on sharing it with everyone else. I call this “taking one for the team.”
Do what you want. No need to overthink things!
Pirate what you need unless you are one of them archiver preppers.
This ain’t about “legality” this is about fighting the class war against owner class.
Fr tho basically what /u/AnimalsDream said
fr fr, I’d shoplift too if it weren’t that easy to get caught
For the authorities: Definitely not the second.
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 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.
do whatever you like nobody cares (no offense)
No need to make everything complicated
Pirate anything you want, and buy from anyone you want to support.
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
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.
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)
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.
I like to think about ethics. I still pirate some random stuff here and there, but one thing I like to do is make sure I’m getting some money to the creators of what I’m enjoying, skipping the middle man as much as can be.
this is mostly only relevant with music, but if I can buy an album or song directly from the artist, that’s awesome. it not, i try to five what service benefits them most.
You should only feel bad about pirating art made by small independent artists, and even then only if you don’t have the disposable income to easily afford it.
Piracy is an actually victimless crime, you aren’t depriving anyone of anything except your hypothetical dollars. And that’s only a loss if you were going to spend them in the first place. Then add the fact that selling digital goods at all is basically a massive scam…
Also, in many cases it’s actually better for the artist to donate directly to them than to buy their products from a store that’s probably taking a cut.
