Well, my friend, he’s kinda poor he can’t afford some books and some streaming services, so he pirates. He pirate books, audiobook and videos and other stuff. Sometimes he buys books he likes a lot out of loyalty to the author (yeah, I don’t understand it either), he likes to read physical books, but yeah, if he hates the author or just wants to skim through it, he will download the book.
He usually doesn’t like to pirate from small companies or professors who are trying to make a living by selling books, but from millionaires & plenty of mega corps which already have loads of money, he feels like it’s the right move to pirate
Also, have you ever noticed that you have felt that the value of a product has decreased just because you didn’t pay for it, thus you are less interested to read it? i.e., had you paid for the book, you would have more likely read that book.
He says he will buy stuff when his time is more valuable than money, let’s all hope that day is soon.
What are your piracy habits?
yes
- copyright is a deeply flawed system invented by capitalists with moronic consequences for well-intentioned artists today
- i regularly support musicians i like through bandcamp (especially on bandcamp fridays where they get 100% of the money)
- i usually do not pirate indie things (but remember that if your only options are piracy or “key reseller” sites, ALWAYS pirate. you are actively costing the devs money if you buy a stolen key from a reseller (and they are all stolen))
- i’m poor and adobe can choke on my balls
- Yes, it has gotten out of hand sadly. But it was a well meant way to stop people stealing intellectual property.
It wasn't well meant, it was Disney who didn't want other people to replicate drawing 3 circles.
If someone else can not only copy the product you designed, but even improve on it, then that is on you.
If i create something new, and you merely copy what i created or you use my thing as advertisement for any of your schemes, then yes, i deserve some protection from that.
I don't have an answer to your exact question but I want to emphasize…
NOTHING in the history of humankind has ever existed like computer data. A 100% identical copy of videos, pictures, and music can be made almost instantly at what is essentially zero cost to the original holder of the data. Any comparison to "stealing" or to a physical object (a car lol) just falls flat because the situation is just so different.
Practically speaking, the world we live in, with computers everywhere, cheap storage, and easy fast internet access for so much of the world, has only been around for about two decades, maybe three. NOTHING like this has ever existed before, and businesses, culture, and laws have been very slow to catch up.
I'm not saying pirating is right or wrong, just that the whole idea is still so new that society hasn't caught up to it yet.
NOTHING in the history of humankind has ever existed like computer data. A 100% identical copy of videos, pictures, and music can be made almost instantly at what is essentially zero cost to the original holder of the data. Any comparison to “stealing” or to a physical object (a car lol) just falls flat because the situation is just so different.
YES!
Nice comment, tq!
In Babylon Alexandria, docking ships were required to surrender any and all written materials to the library. There, scribes would make a copy of everything that was submitted.
The originals of the documents were stored in the library and the copies were given back to the ships.
First instance of intellectual property piracy?
First instance of intellectual property piracy?
Perhaps, but of course there are still significant differences.
To make these copies you needed a team of highly skilled scribes and their accoutrements, and the ship had to wait in port for several days.
That is to say, these copies in babylon would have come at a significant cost.
Give me a reasonably priced, accessible way to enjoy the content and I will happily pay for it.
Streaming has become untenable and now it's neither affordable nor convenient to watch what I want to watch. And with how frequently shows and movies bounce around platforms, who knows if the show I want to watch this weekend will be still available on one if the many platforms I've been paying for.
I'm just done with it.
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Oh let’s be real here, this is what capitalism does. It chooses the worst possible option for entertainment because it’s what makes the most money. What makes the most money is not making you happy, but getting you to stay subscribed.
Let me tell you the real secret. You know what it costs to rent a movie online? And stream it? And then never watch it again? Yeah now justify that against streaming services.
I’ll tell you right now, go get Plex. If you don’t already use a media server, start. Because chances are that you don’t actually watch 90% of what’s on those services. So that $15 a month for content you don’t own could easily be $20 a month on content that you do actually own. Not to mention there’s no ads involved and you can stream as many devices as you want from anywhere. Get friends to pitch in and it’s even better.
The ONLY argument for this is convenience of all the shows at your fingertips. Except now that’s not the case and they’re on different services, screw it, either pirate the media or buy it used on disc.
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Agreed, totally depends on how much you watch. But shopping used DVDs and like I said banding together with friends to buy content eventually begins to work out better for you.
I’m not someone who consumes tv and movie content en masse so it works out for me to do this and for a lot of people who watch a season or two of a show a month, it’s not that much more expensive to own.
What I meant about the capitalism concept is that the core idea isn’t about enjoyment or getting to watch what you want. It’s not about convenience anymore. This is a capitalistic cycle where it stops innovating and starts to poison it’s consumer.
So shows will now be splintered across services, shows will get cancelled for being less profitable, and the overall quality will dip because we’re driving art to the bottom price. Whatever makes shareholders more money. And is this true? I feel like it is. Quality of shows has dipped quite a bit to fit the streaming service pricing.
We can argue about whether people want that or not, but it’s basically just what’s been done with every other consumer item. Dominate the market, lose money, get the subscribers, and then make their experience shittier over time.
When Netflix went viral, things were nice, all the content I wanted to watch was pretty much there, for an affordable price.
Then it all went to shit with geolocking and everyone having their shitty streaming service.
I liked how on Netflix you could initially change language and subtitles, then for some pretty fucking stupid reason they decided to remove languages and subtitles, so I went back to the bay.
Regarding games, it's pretty messed up how Mexico is the most expensive country in the world to buy games, steam normally increases the price up to 75% more than the base price.
Just for context, in my state the average monthly personal income is around $7k MXN which is around $400 USD
Starfield premium edition was being sold for $135 USD. Imagine paying more than a third of your monthly income just to play a bugged ass Bethesda game.
That is bizarre
I pirate when it's literally less effort than buying. This mostly applies to E-books. Also I pirate a lot of shows and movies because fuck subscribing to 10 different streaming services.
I just want a service that's better than Netflix/Amazon/Disney/Spotify can offer. I want all my media in one place. I want access to it even if the internet is down. Segmentation of media across all the platforms is bullshit and it drives me wild. I'm getting less than what I paid for when Netflix was the only game in town. It's worse and less than what it used to, so why bother paying them.
I pirate everything I consume.
I do believe artists should be paid for what they create, so I still purchase music even if I've already pirated it. The artists get more money from me than they would have if I just streamed on Spotify. I think it's a win-win for me and the artists.
Do I pirate? Yes.
My philosophy? I don't wanna pay for it.
Honestly, with the exception of abandonware that can't legally be bought anywhere, piracy can't be legitimately excused. If you do it, you do it because you want something that you should pay for, but don't wanna. Which is a choice you can make, I won't hate you for it, but own that instead of pretending that you have a logical moral argument to getting it.
Based
I don't justify it. I stopped caring. That's as evil as it can get, I suppose.
I directly support artists that I like. I pirate absolutely anything and everything without a care. I do not respect the concept of intellectual property. It is economic perversion to make scarce an infinite resource. May the copyright régime perish.
It's super interesting to me that piracy is generally considered immoral, but going to the library is considered pious. Obviously there's some differences with these things… But in general I find it incredibly frustrating and depressing that we have developed the tools to copy and share information pretty much instantaneously across the globe and that we have decided that this is a bad thing instead of a miracle. Obviously I still want people to be able to make things and make a living, but I wish we could find a better way to do this while providing access to more people. We can have kick-ass libraries with modern technology, but it's stunted for legal and capitalistic reasons… I'm not saying I have all of the answers, but I wish more people could at least recognize that as a shame.
"food isn't grown to feed people. Food is grown to make a profit."
I can't speak for other mediums, I mostly know genre fiction best.
(I also agree that the system we have in place is not the most ideal–it's just the framework current authors work under, and thus the framework that pirating of their works interacts with, if that makes sense.)
If you exclude textbooks (which work under a very different model) and non-fiction (which likewise works in ways I am unfamiliar with), libraries collectively have a ton of purchasing power and can make or break a mid-list author of genre fiction.
Library buy-in can mean an author gets contracted for another book or not. It can mean that author is given another year of breathing room to grow their career or not.
A novelist–and I'm talking specifically about traditionally published fiction novels, not short stories or screenplays or anything else–is part of one of the few cottage industries left. They are not employees of a publisher. Genre authors do not get salaries and health insurance and benefits from the publisher. They are contractors/small businesses.
They hand-craft a unique product, partner with a publisher for a measly $10,000 (or often less) advance for their year of work and some hypothetical small % of royalties from books sold beyond the first advance. That % of royalties may or may not materialize depending on if their work takes off or not, and so many of these authors generally do not make even minimum wage. Also, they are taxed like a small business, about 1/3rd of that measly $10k advance goes towards taxes.
So yeah. A small-time author sells one book for a $10k advance. That advance already has 1/3rd eaten by taxes, and it also gets doled out in shitty little $2k chunks according to whatever points their contract specifies. 10k would be tiny income to trickle in over ONE year, much less across multiple. And most authors don't have the stamina to write more than one book a year–"unicorns" like Seanan McGuire or Mercedes Lackey who can do like 4+ books a year are rare.
Most average genre authors do NOT make Stephen King-like money, most basically work/act like a small one-person business who have a contractor-like relationship with a publisher. They have families or spouses that support them, or a day job, or they live in abject poverty because the publisher does not give them much.
Things like AAA games or movies are different in that there's a lot of funding there and the whole financial aspect of those works very differently.
But your average genre fiction author is basically the same as a one-man indie game team who does nearly everything from art design to storytelling to game mechanics.
And the publishing house is like–hell, let's say Unity because that's all over Lemmy today. You can say the power of a game engine is roughly equal to the power of a book publisher/distributor, if you are examining power dynamics between the actual creator of something, and the tools they partner with to get their thing made and "out there".
Like, if that foundation poofs, whether Unity fucking over devs with weird contract shit, or the publishing house abruptly pulling support from the next books in the author's series, the author/indie developer is super-fucked.
So when you pirate genre authors who probably got less than $10k for their book (spread out over 3 or 4 payments over 1-3 years), the publisher doesn't see enough financial income that would give them incentive to contract that author for another book. So they say "bye" to the author.
And traditionally-published authors are fucked if their name/pen name gets tarnished like that. If they get a rep in the sales databases for being a low performer. You either try to go indie even if you don't have the skills for the business side of things, or you start from scratch with a new pen name that's not tarnished and try to build a new reader base. (Starting to build a base from 0 is hard.)
Whereas if you use the library, the library DID buy that book, and that purchase appears on the publisher's accounts, and gives a tick towards the author being profitable enough to contract another book from. So that author gets another chance to grow their career.
Most authors don't break out with one huge book in genre fiction. Even Terry Pratchett–who died as "Sir" Terry Pratchett by the end of his career–had some real shitty books early in his career, and if his publishers had dumped him early on because there wasn't enough of a profit to justify letting him grow his career and get better we might not have ever gotten the good books he wrote.
Many authors build their careers one brick/book at a time. They slowly get better with time and experience. They slowly accrue fans over time as they develop a backlist of books that a new reader of the latest book can find and devour.
And it's pretty easy to disrupt that process for small-time authors if you choose pirating over library. Because they're one-person dev teams, basically, and the ecosystem is fragile.
(Big name authors–like, ones you actually KNOW have made shit-tons of money–are less affected. King, Rowling, Sanderson, Nora Roberts–are probably financially fine. But in the middle there are authors whose names you KNOW who actually aren't making all that much. It's weird–you might have read a midlist author's books and know their name but they're not raking in all that much even though instinctively you think that because you know their NAME they MUST be rich, right?)
Now, big-budget movies and games…those act differently and are funded differently, they're not one-man shows. There's a lot of greedy corporate assholes at the top of those chains (thus the recent writer/actor guild strikes.) The impact of piracy on those creative mediums is probably different. I'm not informed enough to really know.
But fiction? Yeah, most genre authors are tiny little indie creatives, and pirating actually does potentially fuck them over to some extent, if the author is still alive and still writing as their career.
The big whale authors like Stephen King or Brandon Sanderson or Nora Roberts or J. K. Rowling are the exceptions, not the rule. Most authors are not bringing in that much with their works. The truly giant authors probably won't notice if you pirate–but the smaller authors, that you might mistakenly think is "rich" because you recognize their name, might not actually be all that rich and might actually encounter problems if there's more pirating going on than library checkouts.
Libraries, as a demographic, can add up to be a nice chunk collectively (think how many libraries there are), so an author who is popular in libraries can see continued support from publishers. But if people choose pirating over libraries…well, that support goes away and it's easier for the publisher to say "bye" to the author.
Maybe sometimes it's warranted, some authors just aren't good. There's an element of sink or swim going on with making/selling a book by the nature of it.
But I know as a reader there's several authors I like, and who later won awards…who kinda had crappy early books. Publishers nurturing them through their early wobbly careers is what allowed them to grow into the greats they became. (These days, Publishers are much more cutthroat in getting rid of midlist authors, as I understand it, compared to the 70s/80s/90s.)
And although I mostly talked about traditional publishers above, indie authors can have it rough too (or even rougher) because they directly foot the cost of things like editors and cover artists and the like without being able to spread the risk of marketing and selling their book across a bigger pool of authors like a publisher can.
Great reply :). I definitely agree, and do understand that libraries contribute to sales and can make or break books from certain authors. And I also agree that it feels different when buying something from a massive greedy corporation vs something from a smaller production where the creator probably isn’t making millions of dollars, and might be kind of struggling. I’m definitely not saying I condone these authors and creators starving or these works not being able to be created in the first place because piracy might make them unprofitable. I absolutely think that’s a bad thing! But at the same time I do think it’s a shame we can’t freely distribute these works with all of the amazing tools we have, and it’s a shame we’re losing the right to loan and resell things with digital media. It makes me wish we had some giant government digital library that paid for things with taxes (I mean… arguably this is just a library, but the restrictions and DRM on digital lending are depressing) or universal income or something so this was more feasible. Obviously neither of these would be perfect solutions, but I can’t help but feel like there’s a better way.
Just wanted to clarify, I'm not necessarily saying that we should pirate things and have authors starve or whatever. I guess I just don't think it's as simple as saying "piracy is immoral / moral", I think it depends on the context and on what the overall economic system is, and I like to believe that we could live in a world without artificially imposed digital scarcity and where sharing is a virtue and not a sin.
I pay for things that are more convenient than piracy. Namely games and music.
EBooks and audiobooks are too expensive, the multitude of video services too inconvenient.
My actions sometimes result in massive corporations not maximizing their potential profit. I'm fine with it, capitalism gets all my money anyway.
If I don't have access to a paid version of it, I'll pirate it. It's not like you're losing a potential sale if I literally can't give you my money.
If I disagree with the ethics/philosophy of a company (i.e. Disney) I'll pirate it. They may make good movies but I'll not support them financially.
If it's too damn difficult to find an accessible version of it, I'll pirate it. I'm fine with paying for shit, but not spending an hour of my free time just trying to give you my money.
I can't find any logically consistent way too label piracy as immoral. It doesn't remove the original and it's just creating virtually free copies. It's the definition of a victimless crime.
The fact that you're hypothetically removing profit from the creator only becomes a moral issue if that loss of profit is A) guaranteed, that is, the recipient of the free copy would definitely have paid for it otherwise, and B) is significant enough to impact their life negatively. And the latter happening is much more an indictment of the system that demands people justify their existence through the extraction of profit than it is of the consumers who are just copying a few bytes.
The idea of paying more than a few cents for any digital media is frankly absurd. It's highway robbery that we're paying the same amount to rent a copy of a movie as to buy a pound of meat or a gallon of gas. It's 99% just blatant price gouging.
Some digital media costs a hundred million dollars to make. They make that money back by selling the product.
If nobody buys software, there will be no software companies to produce it.
Well call me a communist but I don't think that our society is benefited by spending a hundred million dollars on a single video game. Or a single movie for that matter. I would very gladly trade the massive AAA budgets for more restrained passion projects.
Any case where I do pirate my philosophy is “Man I tried as hard as I could to give you guys money for this but you didn’t make any way for me to do so”
I pirate cause I want free stuff. No need for me to try to justify it.
