What do you think about piracy? - I'd see no problem with it depending on the source.

[William Tell Underpass]

I would pirate things I would not pay to own / consume.

I developed this approach by realising I would almost never pay for things and gladly sit at home reading internet forums, project gutenberg, and playing 1999 unreal tournament if pirating was not an option.

At the end of the day if I didn't have the pirating option, those same people who don't get my money now still wouldn't.

I spend my dollar to promote things I like, such as the remasters of Crash & Spyro, but that is very much the exception.

 

[Dwight Frye]

With everything being censored or hacked to pieces now to placate the far left, I have no issues pirating older shows or movies I like. I'm not selling the copies or redistributing them, just keeping them for my own enjoyment. I'd rather do that than hunt down out of print DVDs selling for an extremely high price, if the shows have even been released on physical media in the first place. I don't have to worry about disk rot either.

 

[stares at error messages]

The term that copyright protects a work could be shorter. Companies should not be all to own copyrights because companies are immortal and many copyright laws allow for N years after the death of the artist.

 

[Dread First]

Silicon Valley already mines my fucking data to no end, even when falsifying/compartmentalising as much of it as I can. The least I could get is some fucking gratis software out of it. Hell, they should be paying me for all the data they mined off of my accounts over the years. Do we see this happening? Of course not.

Objectively though, the WinRAR model is the best one in order to combat piracy. I will die on that hill tbh.

 

[Utilitarian Clit Dick]

I don't pirate nearly the amount of media I used to, but I'll still download film torrents and rip music illegally on occasion. That said, reasons why I do it:

1) I can do it, seemingly to no end, with no hope of punishment whatsoever

2) I'm big into my classic and foreign cinema, really hard to find shit. Criterion and a few other companies do restoration work on old films, extras, clean-up, etc; but their prices are nothing short of absurd, and really the domain of wealthy film students when purchased even in insignificant quantities

3) with software, as a kid and adolescent I simply didn't have access to any of the big suites due to being poor as fuck. Faced between that and harmlessly downloading an illegal copy, why wouldn't I? Hours of enjoyment and added skill sets accrued for nothing but my own time.

4) preventing buyer's remorse. We've all bought some expensive shit before and realised it was a mistake. I've experienced this countless times both in real life and with stuff I've pirated. In the case of the latter, all it to cost me was the time needed to search out the torrent.

5) I'm very much a physical media over digital kinda guy, so it never sits right for me paying for something which essentially doesn't exist. This is more applicable to software subscriptions and streaming services, but also other media. If I can get away with acquiring a gratis digital copy of something over paying for pixels, I'm going to do it.

6) I get supporting the creator and all that, but money spent on media which not necessarily need be spent, is taking away finite resources which could be better put to work on more pressing and important matters, i. e.: savings, sports gear and other items with no digital analogue, etc. Get the stuff that may be acquired for free, for free; and anything else which must be paid for, pay for it.

 

[💗Freddie Freaker💗]

 

[Pimpleking55]

Since everything has become digital i found there is no attachment to the product, i buy games on steam or movies on netflix and somehow it doesn't register with me as owning something. So pirating is becoming less and less an issue for me cuz there is no difference and more often than not the pirated version has all the dlc. I used to look at my game collection and cd collection with a bit of pride and always bought the fancy collectors edition but now you get a fancy box and in it is a piece of cardboard with a number to download the game....

 

[PhoBingas]

Literally nothing wrong with piracy only soy filled bitch niggas disagree with me.

95% of the time if I pirate something, I'll pick up the legit copy at some point. Call me cheap 'er whatever, but I've been shafted before by online game stores counting launcher install time as game time; so if a game runs like shit within or above spec, I'd rather not be on the hook for a 20-80$ game I won't be able to play without a couple hundred in upgrades.

 

[ClownBrew]

Firmly against it as I have worked as a pro musician. Sorry for the powerlevel.

 

[Santa Fe Swag]

I love piracy, it's how I got to see Shrek 2 as a kid.

 

[YourFriendlyLurker]

I find piracy to be OK, especially with current prices on video games and their "quality". How else should I know if I like the product or its just another pre-beta version issued as alpha? Besides, most of products I really like end up in my bucket list. Another reason is that there are some companies I just don't want to support financially due to their politics, sjws and other shit, while I will almost always buy the products of studios I want to support.

 

[Jarch6]

Copyright/IP is a spook, I love scihub, libgen, and torrenting

This sentiment is shared by everyone who is not under the idealogical dominion of anglo Jurisprudence

 

[Cloaca Rimjob]

Kind of mixed feelings on the topic.

Modern day piracy is obviously a serious issue and merchant vessels should be allowed to arm themselves against amphibious lightbulb heads from Somalia.

Old school piracy was cool though. Maybe not at the time but it did inspire a ton of fun and interesting stories. I think there's something about it that reaches out to people's sense of adventure.

 

[ArnoldPalmer]

I'll pirate everything I can get my hands on. Especially Metallica albums.

I used to buy things until the early 2010s, but with this "You own nothing, goy" approach to buying media, by way of digital downloads, DRM, and streaming? Hah! Fuck 'em!

 

[B2_Spirit]

Piracy of movies and stuff like that, made by mega-corporations with more money than some countries, I don't give a shit about.
(Actual piracy like Somalians RPG-ing boats at sea to ransom its owners I believe should be dealt with in the fond manner the late Britsh Empire employed. Libertarian though their M.O. is).
I'm an artist on the side and I make comics, and I couldn't care less if people pirate my shit. It's literally free advertising and gets me more followers.

 

[Professor G. Raff]

I enjoy piracy, though there are circumstances I will avoid it. Most of the time when I pirate something I tend to interact with it for less time than a demo before I decide I am just not interested and that is not a huge loss to it's creator. I am more prone to pirate things that have no physical version because at that point I can never actually own it, so whether the copy is illegal or not is somewhat meaningless.

An example would be Noita last year. After OneyPlays covered it quite a lot I thought I would try it out. I downloaded it and about 10 hours of gameplay later I started to think "Shit, I really like this." which made me realize I probably needed to support the small developer. Despite the fact it has no physical version I bit the bullet and legit bought it for that reason. Most TV/Movies I don't feel so bad for pirating because they are run by horrible people I don't have to support because I don't care too much about facilitating future content as I even only bother to pirate it rarely. One end I feel kind of bad on is that I pirate a lot of audiobooks for when I exercise, but the price of audiobooks seems way too high to me... I should probably just buy some of the physical books of those I have listened to. Pirating anime is also mixed since the legal option is primarily only to go through Crunchyroll which is one of the worst things you could ever support.

All in all, I think piracy is fine as long as you have at least some self-control and understanding of the creator's situation and can make a judgement call if you're fine with taking it for free or you think paying back is warranted.

 

[Manul Otocolobus]

I think piracy is fine under 2 conditions.

1) You aren't using it to do anything that makes you money. This includes anything for your job. If you use it so you can make money, and you don't pay for it, you're a piece of shit.

2) If you really, truly enjoyed it. If you absolutely would buy it, then you need to purchase it, or you are a piece of shit. Mediocre shit, shit you wouldn't have bought if it wasn't for free, etc... don't pay for it. But if it is something you absolutely enjoyed and would have purchased if you didn't pirate it, you need to buy. Why? Because buying the actual software with your shekels is a vote for the company that this is what you want to see, you want to see more of this shit. Letting them know that is important, because them knowing that is absolutely the only way you get more of what you want. Plus, if you really loved it, you have no excuse for not supporting the people that made it.

 

[p4ddys]

2) If you really, truly enjoyed it. If you absolutely would buy it, then you need to purchase it, or you are a piece of shit. Mediocre shit, shit you wouldn't have bought if it wasn't for free, etc... don't pay for it. But if it is something you absolutely enjoyed and would have purchased if you didn't pirate it, you need to buy. Why? Because buying the actual software with your shekels is a vote for the company that this is what you want to see, you want to see more of this shit. Letting them know that is important, because them knowing that is absolutely the only way you get more of what you want. Plus, if you really loved it, you have no excuse for not supporting the people that made it.

I can agree here. Bought The Witcher 3 few years ago after I played and liked it, at the time I liked the developer.
Also bought Star Traders: Frontiers because it's incredible game by a small developer. Also bought The Dark Legions lots of years ago.

But I'm absolutely never paying for shows/movies(unless watching in the cinema) or any other piece of media I can get for free. Hell, I have HBO subscription from my ISP and i'm not even using that and am still scratching my head like a robbed kike over the Netflix subscription my roommates made me get few years ago. Nothing beats the comfy levels Stremio and Kodi provide and i'm not spending money to see any more nigger kangz and kweenz of medieval Europe.

 

[Lemmingwise]

I'm an artist on the side and I make comics, and I couldn't care less if people pirate my shit. It's literally free advertising and gets me more followers.

I think blizzard is the exact example of how and when companies care about piracy. When they were succesful, but small, they had all these tricks to get their games in the hands of more people. Every starcraft CD could install multiple copies that could play the full multiplayer game. Diablo had a similar kind of spawning version, which allowed one key to create one master and 7 slave copies IIRC.

This is how an upcoming korean cybercafe market was able to afford starcraft for all its pc's in an attempt to hook in young clientele (so much so that it almost became a national sport).

But then a company gets to a certain size where everybody knows them, and the game is no longer growing the pie, but getting more out of the part of the pie you control. That's where they started doing extra anti-piracy into their products. Especially starcraft 2 was made where tournaments had to be sanctioned by those who control blizzard servers. Being in the loop with some of the internal proceedings of blizzard, they really wanted to force korean esports scene to the table. Because blizzard had made almost no money on the korean market, despite a whole industry that stood on their game.

Korean esports leagues refused and instead remained vested on brood war rather than an enthusiastic acceptance of starcraft 2. Starcraft 2 also struggled on the esports scene, because always online is a bad technical necessity for esports events, with all of the technical problems it could and did cause.

As an artist you have no incentive to worry that much about piracy until you're the size of rowling, at which time it becomes sensible to care about it, but only from a greedy business sense of trying to grow the business by getting more and more out of the current fans and customers.

That's also a good way to lose a brand, btw.

 

[Audit]

I fully support a Somalian's right to pillage commercial vessels and taking yacht enthusiasts for ransom. Piracy, writ large, has been a useful tool for waging an economic war against other nations. Back in the good ol' days of the British empire and their just war against the Spanish Armada, the British privateers would liberate large quantities of gold and silver from transport vessels crossing the Atlantic. Not only did this harm Spain's economic clout in Europe, but it also provided well paying jobs for many an honest sailor in the British's employ. Somalia is a third world country, one of the worst. How are they to sustain themselves if they can't loot the occasional vessel headed to and from Asia? Really, the western world ought to be subsidizing the Somalians. The embarrassingly low cost of Asian goods has resulted in countless jobs lost in our nations and increased the destitution of our working classes. Perhaps if we could empower honest pirates from such resourceful nations like Somalia, we could better normalize the cost of imports and improve the competitiveness of our domestic products. Also, yacht owners are fucking pricks and it serves them right getting kidnapped by Africans if they're going to cruise around in unguarded boats that cost a non-negligible fraction of Somalia's GDP.