Hi guys, first of all, I fully support Piracy. But Im writing a piece on my blog about what I might considere as “Ethical Piracy” and I would like to hear your concepts of it.
Basically my line is if I have the capacity of paying for something and is more convinient that pirating, ill pay. It happens to me a lot when I wanna watch a movie with my boyfriend. I like original audio, but he likes dub, so instead of scrapping through the web looking for a dub, I just select the language on the streaming platform. That is convinient to me.
In what situations do you think is not OK to pirate something? And where is 100 justified and everybody should sail the seas instead?
I would like to hear you.
Any piracy related to scientific papers I consider ethical. That kind of knowledge should NEVER be hidden behind a paywall
Abandonware is a very clear cut case of ethical piracy, too. Without it, a lot of digital stuff “wouldn’t exist” anymore. Mainly games, but also loads of productivity programs, doubly so for discontinued platforms, like Amiga computers.
This is quite reasonable
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- When the content is no longer available for retail purchase (i.e old games or shows that have been pulled entirely [see Infinity Train])
- You have a physical copy, but want a digital version.
Slightly more gray: content I’ve already paid for in one form or another. I spent like $100 going to the theater to see Mario with the family. I’m not losing sleep over adding it to my Plex when it hits VOD.
I pay for a smattering of VoD services, I don’t lose sleep over watching something that isn’t available on them.
If corporate greed didn’t force a hundred different services on us, then it might be different.
You say you don’t want 100 different services, but do we really want all media content to be under one roof or just a few players? Consolidation is also terrible for media/art. That’s basically why so many people are against the Actibliz acquisition.
@hoodatninja @majestictechie @vis4valentine @Kushan @charles Isn’t it obvious? They want many players to have all of the content. Which is possible, because content doesn’t run out if one service plays it too much.
All media content under all services.
I’d love that but it’s just not realistic because of how the media publishing landscape currently is. Happy to advocate for that but moving that needle will take decades. My response is it’s usually somewhere in the middle. 5-10 major players, maybe some smaller ones as well. I don’t need access to literally everything ever made. Libraries already have a wonderfully large free collection as it is (for anyone reading this Hoopla is amazing and countless libraries have massive catalogs on it)
Sure, it’s not an easy thing to achieve for sure, but I won’t lose sleep over them losing revenue because they can’t figure it out quickly enough.
Even moreso where it comes to media that’s just not available any more. If you, a content IP owner, don’t make that content available for purchase, then you have only yourself to blame if people pirate it.
If you, a content IP owner, don’t make that content available for purchase, then you have only yourself to blame if people pirate it.
I don’t think we are entitled to someone creative work just because they made it. That opens way too many doors.
This is doubly true for games, which tend to be re-released over and over again on different platforms. This is true to a lesser extent for things like movies, but it’s much worse with gaming where each console is a closed ecosystem that’s incompatible with other systems. At least with Blu-Ray, you can expect any Blu-Ray player to play the movie you’ve purchased. It’s not like a Toshiba player will only play Toshiba brand Blu-Ray discs.
Companies love to use the “you don’t own the game, you own a personal license to use the game” line when revoking rights to play games you’ve legally purchased… But that goes both ways; If you own a personal license to use the game, it shouldn’t matter what platform it’s on, because it’s the same game regardless of whether you’re playing on PlayStation or PC.
Paying for a ticket isn’t the same thing and I’d argue that’s not morally justified piracy. You went from a rental to ownership at a rental price.
I thought you were going to say something like “I already bought a copy of Star Wars thirty years ago, then THEY made the way I watch it obsolete, so I don’t feel as bad getting another copy since I already paid for it once.”
That would be closer to moral than “well I watched it in the theaters once, so I totally own a copy!”
We’ve all got our lines, mate. That’s the point of this post.
Or content you have purchased and have now lost access too, or shit if you buy something at all you can ethically pirate it. You already paid!!
If a product is no longer for sale on any storefront, or the edition for sale is lacking content had by previous versions of the same product, piracy is morally correct for the sake of archival and preservation
On a tangential note, this is the same reason I will not buy a phone without expandable storage. The cheapest statistic of a phone is now the difference between a $800 phone and a $1200 phone. For $30 I can double my storage, but that is not ok for manufacturers, especially when they can make $5 a month for 1G of space, that requires internet access, from millions of people. Learning that most people have to pick and choose memorable pictures and videos just because they run out of space is horrendous to me. The companies know that data storage will increase over time for every user, and they are banking on everyone banking their data in a more insecure manner, with them, at an ever increasing rate. I refuse to have my memories and heartfelt data held hostage by bullshit companies that can’t even support their own devices for more than 5 years.
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Have you heard of the Fairphone? Repairable, modular, and expandable. I have three generations of it at home and they’re all great.
Do iphones have SD cards? And yes, you drive a good point. Expandable storage is a must and super convenient
No and most android companies are also doing away with SD card slots. I have spectrum mobile and the only phones they offer with SD slots are low spec Samsungs.
Gotta love the companies’ sorry excuses for ditching things that are good. “It’s hindering design progress! We need to move away from these outdated standards! We can’t make them work with new hardware!” - On removable batteries and backs, audio jacks, physical keyboards and repairability.
If I have already purchased a copy of the physical media, I don’t think it is piracy to acquire a digital copy of the same media for personal use
No matter you purchase it or not, acquiring something for personal use is ethical imo
A car? you wouldn’t!
Stealing a car is not same as copying a car.
yea… your sentence was pretty generic, anyway it was a joke
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If the product is no longer available to buy officially.
If the product required prohibitively complicated methods to play it (VPN, specific hardware requirements) which can be circumvented by pirating means, so, by extension, I mean region locked software or media in general.
When the quality I want is not available; a stream of a movie in 1080 or very compressed 4k which I want to see in the best quality possible.
These are all really great points I tend to forget about. As a Linux user, it’s a main driver for me too.
If it comes from a large corporation, its probably ethical, since they are exploiting you (or others) in an unethical way.
If it’s an indie team (or one man team for that matter) then it’s probably unethical.
If I would buy it, I consider it unethical to download it to save the money. If I wouldn’t, my Utilitarianism side is kicking in and it’s actually MORE ethical to pirate than not. I also see no ethical problem with trialing something even if it’s indie.
I something is “I don’t like enough to buy, but would play if it was freeware”, that’s the grey area for me. My Utilitarianism side says pirating it is the correct decision, but there’s a part of me that doesn’t agree.
Here is a quick hot take: If a company ever advertised a product in a public setting and the content is no longer available for purchase in a retail setting/manner anyone should be free to acquire it via non-retail means. Full stop.
Like Activision and Fuser, or Nintendo and all their old games.
cough cough 3ds cough cough
Piracy makes up for some huge inequalities in the world. The prices for digital goods do not usually take into account the economies of certain regions. I live in Morocco and our money is really low compared to the dollar. 1 dollar is like 7 Dirhams. The average salary for a normal job is really low if you convert it to dollars. So services like Netflix and HBO would cost 10 times more if you factor in wages and conversion to dollars. Why should we pay that just because we live in another place ? Why do these services pretend to be global and yet they are enforcing US prices on the rest of the world. You can’t even speak of physical goods because Amazon doesn’t give a fuck about Africa. Books would cost 3 times their price in shipping and you have to wait a month or so, not to mention that there are limits on how much currency you spend internationally. The fees for an international card are so high also. In short, without piracy 90 percent of the world wouldn’t be able to partake in anything.
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Regional prices are fair on one hand, but on the other, they open up opportunities for abuse leading platforms to implement region-locking, where you can suddenly find your library unavailable or even entire account inaccessible when noving between countries. That’s the case with steam and spotify, and a few others I can’t quite remember. But yeah, I feel your pain, I even felt bad for that one ps4 my friends used to share between them like that girl in 5 guys meme just because sony doesnt do regional pricing and the games were at times more expensive than their entire PC’s.
I change laptops frequently. Used to buy songs from iTunes and every time I changed laptops, transferred music over, I’d lose access to them. Would have to go thru insane process to be allowed to listen to the music I’d paid for.
Similar thing would happen with some software, Adobe especially.
If you’re going to treat me like a criminal, then I might as well be a criminal. Same with purchasing movies on Amazon.
I tried to pay for minecraft, but 2 hours later, Microsoft wouldn’t let me. Kept trying to make me an Hotmail account.
Growing trend in software I’m not happy with. No longer allowed to own the things we buy, and forced to hand over my email, phone number, address, name, create account… used to be, you could just buy things, simply. That was that.
Corporations are getting drunk with power, overreaching, infiltrating people life.
Also, if in poverty, no food, homeless, etc. If I can’t afford what I need. And can get it another way, I will
Yeah that was my first thought too. Anything you’ve legitimately paid for that the company then takes away or makes extremely difficult for you to access, I think it’s perfectly justified to pirate it then.
I had this experience when while I was playing Bioshock Remastered on Steam, 2K Games in their grand wisdom decided to “update” the game after 5 years of neglect. Oh, did they fix remaining bugs or other outstanding technical problems with the game? No. Of course not. They dropped a “Quality of Life Update” to force a 2K games launcher, which immediately made the game unplayable for me because I couldn’t get the game to launch anymore. The irony.
So anyway, I had to pirate the game I bought and transfer my saves to finish playing.
I felt the Adobe part. I bought Photoshop CS2 back in the day then sadly lost the license key a few years later. I never felt bad for pirating the latest version.
Another example of ethical piracy would be when offline games force you to be online all the time. Minecraft forces me to be online to play through the official launcher. Since I also play with mods that are still a few versions behind, I downloaded a cracked launcher so I can play even when I don’t have internet access.
On Anna‘s Archive Front Page there is a book “Against Intellectual Monopoly”, I think it would give you an interesting perspective to consider too.
Scientific articles. You’re not robbing the authors of a single penny, because they don’t get a cut of the sales by the publishing house anyway and the journal reviewers are volunteers.
many, if not most, authors of such papers are more than happy to provide a copy if you were to ask them directly.
That indeed should be the preferred route when you’re not in a hurry and the contact info is up-to-date, but when you want to binge very quickly through a dozen articles as I used to do a lot that becomes impractical. Sometimes authors are unresponsive too, or deceased in the case of old articles.
Isn’t there an archive site for scientific papers that are freely distributed? I forgot what it was called, should bookmark it.
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If you’re not using it to make money it’s never not OK. I can’t see it as theft. It’s just a different method of obtaining the same thing that doesn’t harm anyone.
Not only are those making this choice unlikely to pay anyways, but all the regular people who worked creating it already got paid so nobody can say “oh the film crew, VFX artists etc will be out of a job”. No they already did their job and got paid. The investors maybe want more money but they aren’t hurting for it, I don’t feel anything for them.
I’d say all piracy that isn’t bootlegging or otherwise profit motivated is pretty ethical. It’s basically a decentralized museum of modern art that our tragically morally bankrupt society can’t be bothered to allow for the legal preservation of.
Watching youtube with adblocker 🤣
I don’t even consider this piracy. It’s just using the web as it was intended.
