No, it’s not like stealing a physical item from a store.
“stealing” a digital copy of a movie, tv show or a game is like if the item you’re stealing from a store is infinitely copyable. Like the replicator from star trek…or that one episode of Sabrina the teenage witch with that box that can make a perfect copy of everything you put inside of it.
Of course I personally would never pirate anything, no matter how much streaming services increase their prices or how much they crack down on VPN usage to get around geo-restrictions, PIRACY IS BAD AND ONLY BAD PEOPLE DO IT.
I’ve never pirated anything in my whole life!
People try to boil these things down to incredibly simplistic rules in an effort to justify what they’ve already decided they’re going to do.
I am pro piracy, as I imagine virtually everyone on this community is. But I also think people get way too reductionist because that is easier than engaging with the nuances of what it means to “steal” or “pirate” or when we are or aren’t hurting a creator.
I think the pros vastly outweigh the cons, the “victims” are few and far between due to it being so rare/situational as to make it ok to functionally treat it like there are none, and I also think all the people arguing they are “doing media preservation” who don’t even know what a proper 3-2-1 backup is are full of shit lol. I also think people need to accept the fact they just want free shit sometimes and trying to dress up their motivations/sense of entitlement to free media with high minded arguments about sticking it to corporations or whatever is disingenuous - just own the decision!
I use my server because it is convenient and because I don’t want my kids being visually assaulted and manipulated every time they turn on a tv. I used to watch my son visibly become panicked when all the tiles of a streaming service would pop up in front of him, it was just so overwhelming. I went a solid seven or eight years without the high seas because there was a time when streaming services were reasonably priced, convenient, and not dominated by ads. Now that that is no longer the case, I have gone back to my server. Simple as that.
I don’t mind paying for a service, I don’t even mind the occasional advertisement in my life. But what we have right now is absolutely ridiculous and easily justifies so many reasons for pirating.
All of this is to say you’re not gonna find people here who disagree with your decision to pirate. But you’re also not going to find some airtight philosophical argument that works 100% of the time. You have to consider the ethical implications of your actions in your day-to-day life, there are no simple rules to avoid that.
I don’t pirate for moral purposes. I pirate because:
I do not have all of the money in the world to simply just spend luxuriously on anything I set my sights on.
I care about having food, a place to stay I can call my own, and a vehicle I need to get to places.
There were stretches in time in my life where I had been broke and too poor while many things have passed me by that I have pirated since.
I find that some services or media just aren’t worth the asking price or the value of what’s there that’s offered, because it does not pique my interest that would make me want to subscribe.
I live a finite lifespan, I do not have all of the time in the world until legal alternatives are available or for some things to be affordable when I know it is likely that they won’t be.
It’s really that simple.
I’m not going to say piracy is right or wrong.
What I will say is if everyone had access to that replicator, and everyone replicated everything in the store and left, the store would close down, and the products would stop being made.
Likewise, piracy is only viable because not everyone does it. If literally every person pirated the games or movies of any given company, that company would no longer be profitable and would close down.
Piracy is getting something for free because other people pay for it.
Except there are people who buy something AND want to have offline backup copies of it.
Do you think that is the majority of people pirating? How do you even think it’s 10%?
Of course. When people need to save money and have to consider what expense to cut away. People need something to tend to.
They promised they would go out of business if I pirated their content, and that was a lie.
And of course, they did go out of business. That’s why they need welfare from the government now.
You should never pirate anything, that would be bad.
There are people who understand what I’m saying, and then there’s the idiots that downvoted me on some of the comments I posted
And yet you can borrow anything from the local library for free and its considered totally fine and not pirating.
If “buying” is not owning, then “piracy” is not stealing.
Why do you have to take a moral stance?
Do it because it’s cool
It is always morally acceptable to pirate things
made by giant corporationsFixed it for you.
I’d make a point saying that there’s a personal moral and a broader societal understanding of morality, and they don’t always align.
That’s a fair point.
my view on it lies in two seperate buckets:
- if the thing being pirated is vastly overpriced for its function i don’t see it as immoral
- if the thing being pirated is no longer available or was never made available for private ownership, ie only able to be streamed and only available on said service so long as the host streamer still has rights to do so, it isn’t immoral.
and just to be clear, i don’t see piracy as inherently evil or anticapitalistic. there have been several books and apps that i pirated that i liked and converted to an actual buyer to get more books in the series or get updates to the program.
Private property is theft piracy in all forms is morally exceptable. DMCA actively harms progress, and this isn’t some techbro take as I disagree with AI.
There is no “stealing from corporations”
It’s as easy as that
It is always morally acceptable?
Morality is, literally, subjective. There is no universal answer to that question.
I personally consider anything being sold by a distributor to be fair game, no questions asked. If I pay for mainstream music, films or games, most of the time, zero of that money goes to the workers who created those artworks. It just makes rich owners richer, because they legally own rights. I would go as far as to say it’s morally wrong to pay for those things, it’s not neutral, it’s supporting a cycle of abuse at your own expense. So that’s my perspective on your ‘giant corporations’ question.
Digital copying isn’t stealing, unfortunately, because those giant companies deserve to have their hoard of capital expropriated.
But if not a lot of sales are made, they won’t work with the same people again and will play more safely, and we’ll get less diversity
But maybe the people who were working in big studio movies would shift to independent film making with lower budgets and more diversity.
Obviously it’s also not a good solution, but do we need the big studios to make yet another avengers or minions?
If they keep raising my food subscription I’m gonna start pirating from supermarkets too
¿Por qué no los dos?
I pirate to save money =]
I do since it’s a better service
Piracy is a response to various kinds of market failure, inequality.
