How many times do we have to write this exact line? “Piracy is not stealing, as the original remains in the hands of the owner. Piracy is simply making a copy and distributing it.”
It’'s not a morally correct act to be sure, however we really need to come up with a better terminology.
I do agree with your assessment of this particular twat though.
You have to keep saying it because it’s not true. I’ve known artists who have seen their work stolen. Until then I never truly understood the hurt it causes them. I watched a normally jovial friend spiral into anger and depression. Sure, pirating some garbage Marvel movie isn’t going to impact much. But you take that same mindset and scale it down, and now you are hurting real people.
See that’s just the thing, I pay for media that’s worthwhile, especially from the smaller folks out there. Marvel, disney, Blizzard etc. Can suck my left nut, their shit isnt worth the pixels they render it on.
I support creatives with direct donations. When you buy Netflix, you’re supporting extraordinarily wealthy capitalists.
If you actually care about supporting creatives, end all your subscriptions, pirate all your media, and give 100% of your previous subscription costs directly to the creatives you want to support.
Piracy is whatever. Using an old school ass MP3 player in 2023 is unhinged though. I’m sure their phone can do whatever that MP3 player can do just as easily.
That hasn’t been a concern for me since the early days of the modern smartphone era. But I can see it being an issue for older phones with worn out batteries or something.
As big media has screwed us by changing their offerings from products to services, as such I have changed my perspective about piracy. I will gladly patronize a creative by paying for their services, i.e. attending their performances. Their performance is a service. Their products, the media, is no longer. Copy it as you wish. They want to change the rules on us and convert what we buy from products to services which milk every last penny from us, contributing to this disastrous economy, they’re going to get a taste of their own medicine. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. They don’t like it when you used the rules they changed (intending to milk your wallet dry) against them. Boo hoo. I guess they don’t get that last million dollars. Meanwhile, we work 80 hours a week just to break even financially, but driving us further and further to the brink of madness, knowing that unless some revolution changes things, we will never be privileged enough to have earned enough money to accrue enough savings to retire, they’d rather have us poor and beholden to the 1%-ers above us. You should know this famous saying, “boss makes a dollar, I make a dime”. The people are starting to fight back with unprecedented coordination, thanks to the presence of the internet, which really hasn’t been present in previous revolutions. Big media has weaponized it against us, and we can do the same. We, the poor, use it to share our thoughts, which lead to a coordinated action to take them down a few pegs. The shit is rolling uphill, and the top brass is quietly panicking, rest assured they know where the real power comes from. Us.
Today I was driving and I saw graffiti that really resonated with me. “I miss America” was written. I know the America they’re referring to. The America that existed before the rich fine tuned their weaponized capitalism, perfecting it in order to extract the most mosyndromecough) don’t want to acknowledge any responsibility for the effects of their actions. We’re about to see a miracle, folks,grab your money… shit is about to roll uphill! I can’t wait to see the looks on their faces when they begin breaking down yelling, searching for others to blame during their final days in office, trying possible at all times, whether it’s immoral or unethical, they blame their inhuman position of inhumanity on “fiduciary duty to stockholders”. This garbage needs to stop. We, the laborers, are being driven to mental destruction. Why don’t they why they are the reason people are snapping, having psychological meltdowns and shooting up public places. All these mass shootings are the signs and symptoms of a sick society, they just prefer not to connect A and B. They don’t consider modern slavery being a factor in the deteriorating mental health of the entire working class, the 4 no room to retire based on the rules set forth from day 1, so they’ve effectively given them nothing to lose. The concept of “company loyalty” is a joke, because time after time, they’ve clearly demonstrated zero care about their employees, and illustrated there will be no 2-week notice when their that ć5d 0żdcorporate bean counter decides they could save money by giving employee A the tasks and responsibilities that employee B formerly had, and ditchingd##€l9765 kemployee B. Our overlords (especially those with out of control ego problems, coughorange Chevy Chase syndromecough). They will predict to deflect ownership of the disaster that has finally reached them. You know what they say, when a good The silver lining is by that point, the effects of the situation** they’ve created, which us poors have been living in, will be unstoppable. It’s just a matter of time now.
This isn't as much of a meme as it's a commentary on the state of the media industry. Even when my disposable income was great enough for me to subscribe to multiple services, piracy is just so damn easy and convenient that I'd rather pirate everything I want and have it all on my own streaming server (jellyfin) and be able to watch everything in one place, instead of having multiple services with hardly any worthwhile content. Having to scroll through hundreds of movies and shows I have no interest in to find the handful of things worth watching, spread across multiple services and apps, is nothing but a headache. Plus, even if I pay for a subscription, they up their prices on a regular basis.
This is no meme, this is a statement that the only real way to enjoy media without headaches is piracy. This has always been the case and always will be.
I personally don’t believe in copyright. Nobody should be able to own an idea or data and be able to tell me what i can and cannot do with said 1s and 0s, which is what digital media is. I will find other ways to support artists and creators like going to concerts, donating or buying merchandise etc… You can’t steal data because nobody owns it to begin with in my view.
Anything confidential should be kept encrypted or offline of course.
I get what you’re saying but copyright is necessary otherwise nobody would create anything. If you can’t get compensated for your work then why put the effort in?
Hollywood wouldn’t exist without copyright and you might say oh well Hollywood doesn’t produce much good, but it does produce the vast majority of media you probably consume. I’m not saying you’re completely wrong but I don’t think you can just go Copyright = Bad, and leave it at that.
We should just use crowdfunding instead. There’s a lot of money you don’t have for crowdfunds because of IP monopolies today. Hollywood wouldn’t make as many high budget films, but it would remain a major hub for filmmakers who no longer need to appeal to entrenched business interests.
We’d get a lot of low budget but actually original films.
Lot of armchair philosophists disagreeing with you, but you’re right.
Sure, some people make art for art’s sake. But it doesn’t put food on the table. Like it or not, most popular media is created at least in part as a source of income for the creator.
It’s fine to pirate things if you actually can’t/wouldn’t otherwise engage with the media. But at least be honest with yourself and recognize that you’re stealing income from the creator.
‘Nobody would create anything’ is an absolute lie that we’ve been fed, simply another part of the capitalist brainwashing propaganda.
The truth is people love to create stuff for the sake of it, and many people will create things even when it costs them time and money, because they enjoy it. The only thing that would be necessary for them to create things prolifically would be to ensure their ability to live and work without having to worry about ‘making a living’ or having to ‘earn’ enough money to live, and people would be producing tons of content.
If you doubt this, you’re not paying enough attention. People create amazing stuff without even hope of being paid. I have read hundreds of fanfics - some poorly written, some very well written - that never made money and never could make money. They were written because the writer wanted to tell a story with characters they loved. I have seen vast amounts of fanart, again, made with no hope of obtaining money. Especially before things like Patreon - these days you can make some money making fanart, which artists resort to because they have to, but every artist I’ve ever talked to hates the part of their life they have to devote to the ‘business’ side of things. Most early webcomics had no way of making money. Even today, most webcomics do not make money - most are simply made by creators that want to share their story and art.
In the gaming world, mods - free, unpaid mods - have been around for ages, and many of them are as amazing or even moreso than professionally made games. A very tiny minority of mod creators manage to turn a successful mod creation into a job in the industry, but the vast majority do this simply because they want to and enjoy making a thing people will appreciate.
Movies are about the only field I haven’t seen a plethora of freely made stuff in, and that’s probably a personal experience thing. I know there’s some.
Overall, I guarantee we would not see less things created as long as we allow creative people to use whatever they want and do not force them to toil for their survival, to have to monetize everything or else lose their standard of living. We would see rather an explosion of new creations, just like we saw when the internet rose to prominence and people started doing this kind of thing and posting it publicly. Only we would see it at an even greater scale.
“The only thing that would be necessary for them to create things prolifically would be to ensure their ability to live …” We can already do this. It’s called paying them. Your entire argument is people would make things for free as long as they could get money. Do you realize how nonsensical that sounds?
In a capitalist worldview, which is indeed the system we live in, your point makes sense. However, creative endeavors existed well before the ability to profit off of them. If I didn’t want for money in my daily life, I’d still be intensely motivated to create, as it’s one of the few things you can genuinely love doing regardless of if it’s making you money. Being creative is magnitudes more “basic human instinct” than making money will ever be, and I don’t buy for a second that “nobody would create anything” without the profit incentive. I do think that we would have a very different system for sharing our creativity without copyright, and it’d arguably be a better one than what we have now.
Big if. We unfortunately don’t live in a world where you can stay alive for long if you dedicated your time to the arts without getting paid. But in an ideal world where that wasn’t the case? I would agree with you there.
Anyone know what happened to the rarbgdotbest? It was a mirror for taken down rarbg, are there any others? I’ve tried rolling my own with docker but can’t get it to work :/
I have games bought with 0 hours played because I already played them with my pirate hat.
When you are a pirate you have a different mindset. You get to really choose who do you want to give your money to, and you tend to chose people who really deserve it.
There are only a few games that I bought without the opportunity to test them before the purchase. And I don’t mean a scuffed demo that only gives you a very shallow impression of how the different game systems interact with each other, I mean actually being able to play the damn game.
I don’t subscribe to the idea of hype purchasing just to shit on the game after release because it’s inevitably gonna be trash. Last time I made that mistake was with D3, oh boy, was that game a dumpster fire on release. The next thing I’m gonna buy without testing it first will be the Fangs of Asterkarn expansion for Grim Dawn. The devs are awesome, the base game is awesome and the last 2 DLCs were awesome too, so that’s why I don’t need my pirate hat in this instance.
Profit is what’s leftover after everyone gets paid.
Profit, by definition is excess.
You might want to study some basic economics before you come across as being clever. You’re buying into rhetoric that exists to take advantage of your ineptitude.
As Mark Twain once said, “it’s easier to fool a man than to convince him he’d been fooled.”
LOL profit is the motive of literally every business on the planet. You don’t even need “basic economics” to understand that.
As James Downey once said: “What you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this sub is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.”
I’m still not understanding what that has to do with this discussion.
I can tell. It’s in response to your hyperbole, “Is it your hope that they will stop producing media for you to watch?” You are arguing that if they make less profit, then they won’t make media at all which isn’t true.
Is it your hope that they will stop producing media for you to watch?
If people had higher standards for what they spend their money on, businesses would have to meet those standards or go out of business. They can, they would just make less profit.
That means more money for you and me.
You really should study basic economics. It’s sad watching you laugh and dismiss facts because they describe how you’re being taken advantage of.
You are arguing that if they make less profit, then they won’t make media at all which isn’t true.
Buddy, you’re the one that said “or they make nothing at all” , not me.
You really should study basic economics.
For the third time, none of this has anything to do with economics, basic or otherwise.
It’s sad watching you laugh and dismiss facts because they describe how you’re being taken advantage of.
It’s sad watching you struggle with the difference between not paying for something and choosing to steal it. It’s sad watching you poorly try to justify crimes because, in your opinion, it’s too expensive. I’m not being taken advantage of. I pay what I think the service is worth, and when it fails to meet that value proposition, I simply don’t watch it…
Typically, personally, I will subscribe to a service for a month or 2 at a time because by that time I have consumed everything interesting that it has to offer.
I pirate because it’s more convenient, surprisingly I don’t pirate games and music because of steam and spotify, steam is just convenient, so is spotify it’s more convenient than fucking around with finding music you like
movies/tv shows it’s more convenient to have my own plex server
Gaben himself in interviews says all data points towards the best way to combat piracy is by providing a good service/convenience. The biggest reason for piracy isn’t money, surprisingly.
Personally I stopped sailing when streaming services just started. They were reasonably priced, they weren’t fragmented, and I could hop to another one for a month and catch up on their exclusives. Then they started becoming bastards in every single aspect of convenience and cost so back to sailing.
I used to pirate movies but ever since torrent sites stopped working or started giving you .exe files, I stopped watching movies completely. Unless it’s a movie on TV ofc.
AND you have access to NEARLY EVERYTHING, with the right trackers…. vs one sub to n-flix getting you 2% of shows. My server has Simpsons S01-s13 randomizer, KotH randomizer, and Futurama randomizers… can’t get that on Netflix!
Money is not the issue to me. I’ll happily pay for every episode I watch, maybe even per download. I just don’t want my content scattered across different platforms in suboptimal quality and be forced to pay a fixed fee even if I just need the one show on that platform.
If media/publishing companies would just throw the exclusivity model in the trash where it belongs (and let DRM die too), then everyone could pay to see what they want on their platform of choice without this bullshit. As long as that’s not the case, I don’t see myself using these “services”.
I just don’t want my content scattered across different platforms in suboptimal quality and be forced to pay
That and also the fact that sometimes content vanishes from those platforms because of licensing agreements and/or get censored like many older TV Shows have gotten.
Oh, yes, so true. Like when a game is no longer up for buying because one of the music tracks in the OST had it’s license rot, perfect customer service
Not really over a 5 year period, especially if you talk about more than a single subscription service. If you mean by preserve as keeping a full 3-2-1 backup, then yeah sure, but most people don’t need that. Double backup the truly important/rare content, everything else can be redownloaded in case of tragedy.
For posterity, 1 year of HBO Max or Disney+ is $150. Over 5 years that’s $750. If you are someone who knows you annually rewatch content, then that’s likely a guaranteed expense. Btw, if you pay month to month unless it’s less than 8 months of the year, monthly is more expensive, so I’m being generous here. No managing monthly subscriptions is also a major benefit.
That price nets you at least six 8TB HDD’s at $109 each, which 48TB is far more storage than most people would ever need so some of that cost can go to a power efficient Optiplex and some to spare for a VPN leaving you with at least 32TB.
As mentioned, each additional streaming service is going to exponentially increase that cost, further justifying your investment, and the peace of mind that whatever service hasn’t removed it.
Technically you use your time to pay for “setting up and maintaining it” but… That’s some BS honestly. Plex/Jellyfin are set up once and forget about them. Us nerds put in time to curate and go the extra mile, but most people can very easily have a simple low power server running. If they can set up the *arrs (not really very hard) then good automation for them, if not manually searching for what you want as you want it is one more step than a subscription. More steps if you need to sign up for the first time ;)
Granted - a streaming service doesn’t charge you $325 for the initial server+storage, however streaming services also don’t give you a lot of things for 2.10 years of streaming so I’d say it’s worth the investment. And it definitely does not cost more to preserve your media if you subscribe to more than 1 service. If you subscribe to only one and cancel monthly and spend your time managing that then maybe. (but if you don’t need 4k and consume that little content, you may still be better off with a Pi-like and a hard drive…)
It depends very much how and why you pirate. I guess for many it is a hobby, they are data horders, etc. If you only stream pirated media online and use free cracked software like I mostly do, it is also totally free to pirate. But it costs you another resource then: time! So yes, piracy has a cost, the effort you have to put into it. It’s the same like trying to avoid the big five. Installing a custom os on your phone, blocking ads and intrusive trackers, selfhosting stuff etc all takes a lot of time and effort. So most people just pay for this stuff with their money or with their data out of convenience. When it gets too pricey, then they start finding alternatives. I would argue that we shouldn’t let convenience deter us from trying to be independent and having our sovereignty over our personal data respected.
The streaming was sort of OK, and now it’s wank. Spread across dozens of services, that don’t have enough content to justify their existence. No UI linking them all together means you have no idea if something is available or not without checking justwatch.com
The Plex watchlists seemed stupid and pointless to me...until someone pointed out you can subscribe to your Plex watchlist in Radarr/Sonarr. Now, I can watch trailers on Plex, add stuff, and it shows up automatically when released. Super convenient.
At least Chromecast for TV basically does this. I can search for something and it will tell me all the ways I can watch for any installed app even unsubscribed.
Still, the issue of paying multiple monthly fees to see what you want is ludicrous. It’s as if the media companies maliciously complied with consumers’ desire to pick and choose what they watch rather than pay $200 a month for 1000 stations they don’t watch.
Now, you have to pay $200 to get all the services that have what you want to watch - and you still have to sift through the drek.
The hunt is part of the fun. Like how people will opt to build a PC or a keyboard over a pre-built or pull out vinyl over digital. The steps taken to retrieve and enjoy the media is sometimes a relaxing process.
Throw in a spouse, kids, good but demanding job, a place to live, social obligations, detoriating (geriatric) parents, and you’re so happy you can just mash one single button and your favourite track, game or series starts to play.
That’s the reason why people stop pirating. Time.
When time is not (yet) your most precious resource you can see the fun in anything. Even virus scanning.
Really? I could understand that point from someone not in the piracy community, but doesn’t seem any more time consuming than posting on lemmy. Not really starved for time if someone is spending their time on social media.
Mind you I don’t pirate software or games, so maybe that’s why. Pretty much hardest has been waiting for download to finish.
There is stuff worth pirating, stuff which can’t be found through other means or is way overpriced. Stuff like old movies or impossible to legally gather roms.
For all others: “convenience is king.”
And you’re smart to not pirate software. The. “no illegal software” rule has saved me many times.
What are you pirating that makes it so hard? I don’t bother with software or programs so it’s just pretty much looking at what’s newly released and torrenting it.
Why even pirate if it’s that much of a pain? Pretty much same logic to me a someone who complains about how confusing pc gaming is. I’d point to the consoles.
Also, complaining about not having time but wasting their time talking to strangers online. I could understand the perspective from someone who doesn’t pirate, but to a pirate it is pretty hilarious seeing them making it out as this incredibly difficult time consuming thing like infomercials do.
If you have money to spend (and THAT much), you can still pirate, but if you pirate without trying to fund the source of your art and tools, you’re a mega asshole. Especially if you have as much money as this dude claims to have. You can find the creators of your games online, find their ko-fis, their patreons. Where there’s a will there’s a way
Depending which country we’re talking about. Top 5% in Malawi is probably still a person who needs to pirate, although I could be wrong about that with 3rd world wealth inequality.
Edit: Based on the top 10% figure, guesses and napkin math, that’s an income of about 5000USD annually, so yeah pirate away.
Are you free to learn or consume as necessary for your survival from the society you’re expected to grow to support? No? Then you have a need to pirate.
I think the point was that despite him being top 5% of earners in his country, he’s still poor and thus still pirates.
For me it’s always been different, I’ve always pirated from a data archival perspective, which is why I’m also a maintainer/contributor of several open-source data archival projects.
this. pirate all you want, netflix/disney/etc. will be fine. but find and support the artist. this is why i’m now stuck with the crap news around bandcamp. there are less and less ways to support creators instead of the leeches every day :(
bandcamp was sold to epic games in 2022 and again to songtradr this year, and half its staff got laid off recently. CEO said that it was not profitable enough - though it was already very profitable. So it’s likely to start squeezing every penny out of users and artists in the next few years
Why the downvotes, he’s got a point. Big mega corps that release $70 games while abandoning the old games are the most moral argument you can make for piracy.
Is that relevant to my comment? I said support the creators directly, not the corporations and explained with examples. That reply was suspicious and arrogant asf if you ask me. I never said spend 60$ for the game, I said support the creators directly, even through smaller amounts. Even a euro from a person who can is enough. You cracked the game, you liked it, why not do that bare minimum if you legit have that money + a lot more?
I think that funding creators is great if you have the money and the inclination. I just don’t think that it makes you an asshole if you don’t.
There are creators whom I fund because they give me exclusive extra content on their Patreons or sometimes if I just think that their work is important enough and I want to see it continue. If I decide that I need that money for something else, that’s up to me.
Especially if you have as much money as this dude claims to have.
I mean, this is on 4chan. Regardless of whether this is true or not, the post is blatantly narcissistic. I don’t know why it should be here and what’s there to discuss.
For some people, it’s the convenience with pirating. It’s easier to pirate a movie from a go-to piracy website that you use than to find in which of the 50 different streaming sites the movie is available.
I mean, Apple movies, Steam and Spotify or whatever your storefront of choice is will 95% of the time have what you’re looking for. The only tricky medium to find stuff is TV.
Absolutely, this guy doesn’t care one bit about anything but the cash and status.
I pirate as much as the next bloke, but also buy multiple copies of some games because I enjoy them so much, or to get friends to play. I’m looking at you terraria…
It’s for the same reasons I would rather support a YouTuber I like directly through Patreon etc. than by disabling my adblocker.
Also I’m top 4-5% in my country, but compared to developed countries in not even at top 50% and so many of these digital products are not necessarily priced lower for my region specially the big houses like EA and Ubisoft, so I understand the original comment. And i also agree on the second part that where there is a will there is a way.
But i remeber donating about 10$ for a small dev that was livestreaming and i had pirated the game because game costed 40$. And I thought 10$ was a decent enough donation to cover my sins. Dev in a couple of days was crying over stream about how donating 10$ is doing nothing and he just would buy a beer (10$ buys about 14 beers in my country) and was just being an ass over the stream.
I’m not saying all devs are like that, but for a lot of third world country pirating is a lifestyle not because they just want to keep stealing, they just see it as a movement against wealth inequality. I’m not saying it’s right or not, I’m just explaining how the thought process works.
I never said it wasn’t, but that was an extreme anecdote first of all, and second, I have re-iterated that this doesn’t apply to people who don’t have such disposable income. Relative to their cost of living, always. Pirating is a lifestyle, stealing from poor creators when you make a substantial amount of money is not. What you sent was enough, more than enough. The dev in question sounds like a jackass and unfortunately he wouldn’t be the first with how many indie and major game devs turn out to be horrible people.
The only “pirating” I do these days is using real debrid and I think that’s the lightest pirating you can do since I since have to pay although an extremely small amount compared to a traditional streaming service.
All I see is people putting on clown makeup when they try to defend paying for a profitable product they could otherwise get for free.
Mark Twain was right. It’s easier to fool someone than to convince them they’d been fooled. This generation is full of proud idiots. It gives them a sense of belonging.
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