Basically: should i care about ethics?
Ef ethics in a world where greed is the norm imho.
I am just going to buy from the actual bands when I buy music. If they do not have DIY from now on, I will just listen to something else. There are plenty of bands that do their own production.
IMO support indie creators when you can. Aside from that, ahoy!
If buying isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t stealing.
Piracy isn’t stealing regardless.
Stealing is to deprive someone of something they posses.
It’s not possible to possess something that doesn’t exist yet. Your copy doesn’t exist until you make it (by downloading the file).
If you chose to not support creators by paying to copy thier work, that’s maybe unethical but it’s not stealing.
If you hack into a Sony server and copy an unreleased film, then delete their copy, that is maybe stealing. Anything short of that is just copying.
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.
Basically: should i care about
ethicscapitalist ideology?No.
The system is literally genociding people, destroying the planet, etc. It’s a major mistake to take their “ethics” seriously. It’s just another grift. Enjoy the natural freedom of information while you still can.
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Do what your ethics dictates. There is no right or wrong answers.
Support the creators who deserve support. Otherwise you will end up with nothing good to pirate, because all the creators who deserved support and made your favourite creations, starved to death (or got other jobs, effectively the same thing)
Your single act of piracy is not likely to make a difference either way, but on the other hand, your single act might indeed be the straw that breaks one particular camel’s back. And collectively we have to take some responsibility for that. It’s not even just about ethics (although it is ALSO about ethics), it’s about self-interest. You can be an individual freerider if you want, but eventually the freeriders overwhelm the system and it shuts down.
Realistically there will always be plenty, plenty of games to pirate. But the key question is, will enough of those be good games, the really enjoyable ones that you want to play? The AAA slop and rehashes will never stop, oh they’'ll churn and froth and lay people off and blame pirates but they’re effectively self-sustaining, it takes money to make money and it takes money to lose money and there’s enough money in the system to keep them churning out sequels and derivative “new IP” until the heath death of the universe. There will always be some good games to pirate and to play no matter what you do, no matter what we all do.
But it’s not a binary condition whether our financial support or piracy matters. You vote with your dollars. Your dollars guide the AAA studios in their desperate chase to steal the dollars from us, and your dollars literally enable indie developers to continue their projects at all. If too many people are not rewarding the kinds of novel and well-made games they want to see from AAA studios, and not supporting people’s passion projects that they’ve poured years of their lives into, you’re not going to see as many novel and well-made games or passion projects like that happening, and odds are good that at least one of the ones you won’t see happening will be one you really would have enjoyed.
Best answer. Definitely support those who deserve it!
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.
Technically you rented that what you think you bought and when the licence expires the game,movie, etc. will be deleted from your library, best recent example is The Crew by Ubisoft and there was that whole debacle with Sony and their Discovery Channel licence where people lost a ton of documentaries, was later restored… mostly, but it showed how fragile this digital ecosystem is and why people turn to piracy eventually since you basically don’t own anything you shouldn’t feel guilty about it.
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
Do whatever you want I personally live in iran and I have a 160$ salary previously 300$ but snapback mechanism sanctions something something and 2 AAA games are 160$, also do not buy from key selling websites that harms the developers but piracy doesn’t its the same as nobody buying
You wouldn’t steal a salary
Pirate anything you want, and buy from anyone you want to support.
As I’ve made more money in life, I pirate the same amount of stuff, basically (besides games). But I also spend a shitload of money on the stuff I like. Instead of paying Netflix or Spotify, I buy DVD/BD box sets, collector’s editions, vinyl, bandcamp my favorite albums, and way too many concert tickets. Avoid the middleman and support the creator.
besides games
Yeah, same here. I haven’t pirated games since I was a broke university student. There’s simply no need to when digital storefronts make it easy to get the games I want in the format I want. Some even offer DRM-free offline backups, or in the case of Steam the games stay in my library even if the publisher decides to remove the title from the Steam storefront.
TV and movies are completely different from this, and so much worse. So many different streaming services, some with intrusive ads, and every one wanting their own monthly subscription. I shouldn’t need to search “where is X streaming.” Ever. Titles disappear from these services all the time. Even if you “buy” a digital movie or show, the rights holder can yank it back from you because… reasons?
TV and movie distribution is such a garbage deal for consumers that open source developers have created a complete software stack (the servarr stack) to automate the process of finding and downloading media. Once you get it set up, it’s about million times more convenient than corporate streaming services.
TL;DR: Getting digital games is easy and feels like a fair deal for the average consumer. Getting movies and TV shows is a pain in the ass and feels like an absolute shit deal for the consumer. I’ll continue to pirate movies and TV shows because as Gabe Newell famously argued, piracy indicates a service problem.
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.