I will torrent the latest movie, but I will buy the latest album from my favorite band directly off Bandcamp. Might even buy a t-shirt or some stickers.
I buy the things I want to support. Small game studios get my money. Bands get my money directly, I buy albums and merch. Pretty much, small businesses or organizations that put great amounts of care and love into their high quality work get my money all day, as directly as i can. But would I pay for an Activision/EA game? Or a Marvel movie? Absolutely not.
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.
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.
From Limewire to QBitorrent, I’ve been sailing since I’ve had a computer.
It’s crazy that people aren’t aware of the alternatives out there, when all it takes is a little googling. But I guess that’s just a sign that the likes of Netflix and Spotify have a stranglehold on mainstream consumers though
I pay for netflix, prime, disney+, paramount+, youtube premium, nebula, and a few more services. I buy music and movies, if available, on bluray and rip them to my own jellyfin server.
And yet, about 20% of what I watch, I’ve got to pirate because there’s no reasonable way to actually watch it. Legal ways often only have the German dub, or are lower quality.
(When I was younger, my family was relatively poor, so back then I obviously pirated everything, but once I could afford it I wiped my entire collection and bought the exact same content properly again, for moral reasons obviously but also because I prefer to do rips myself so they’ve got proper quality).
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.
I mean, if you can afford it you should support industries. I pirate a lot. Movies. Games. Music. Etc. Nothing wrong with that IMO, at this point piracy is the closest we can get to true ownership over anything because the entire industry has fcked over consumer rights for assumed profit. But I still buy physical releases because I don’t want content I enjoy to die and I like building a collection of good content. Blurays are great (although also DRM encumbered :/), nothing beats the smell of new manga, and at this point music streaming is just a far better experience than piracy (I use qobuz). If you’re young or poor then do what you have to to enjoy yourself. If you’re an adult with a great salary then don’t be an entitled prick. If theirs ways to support content you enjoy you should. If such ways aren’t provided like most Netflix originals not having blurays then fck Netflix release some blurays if you want my money.
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.
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.
There’re a couple of huge downsides (for me personally) to streaming services that just grinds with me:
the quality is always worse than physical media, and
scrobbing (moving back and forwards in the video, with the arrow keys or by moving the playback head) is almost never instantaneous, it usually requires a couple of seconds while the video rebuffers
Perhaps physical media is better these days (than DVDs were) for scrobbing, but then you have the FBI piracy messages to deal with. I’ve never owned a BluRay player, perhaps they’re better?
But I know that sailing the high seas gets me a high-quality video, and I can jump backwards ~5 seconds instantaneously when I’ve not heard a bit a of dialogue.
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 :/
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.
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