I’m well over 25 years of sailing now (40 if you count games for early PCs), and they’ll pry the sabre out of my cold, dead hands. I’ve made not watching ads a lifestyle and piracy is so much easier than dealing with the bullshit interfaces of streaming companies.
If I have a way of directly donating to creators and not via their shitty production companies, I’ll take it. Podcasts have it right, I can send money to creators and get an ad-free stream. If I can’t, I don’t donate and I don’t listen to their work.
In the end, me avoiding ads isn’t costing anyone anything, because if I hear an ad, I likely avoid that product going forward. They have at best zero effect on my buying decisions, if not a negative one.
I’m a lot like you in a way, and I agree with what you said, but I just wanted to note that you are NOT invulnerable to marketing or ads. Advertisement (brainwashing) techniques have been researched for centuries, and with massive resources. I think even the very thing where some people think they can’t be affected by marketing, is a marketing technique itself. Probably.
Possibly, but I encounter very, very few ads. So I might take a chance heard product and research it into a purchase, but I’m not going to do the “seven exposures and they’re sure to buy” sort of thing.
You’re right. If you can afford something you like you should steal it, it’s much better. Whenever I go into a library I just take a bag and dump all the books and take them home. Why should I put in the effort of wasting my time(meaning money I could have earned) signing a library card when I can just steal? It’s THE MOST EFFICIENT WAY. That’s how I stay RICH. I never pay. Whenever I see someone about to pay for something they want I just steal their money, why should they keep it if they’re not smart enough to not waste it? Their money is much safer with me. The apartment I’m currently living in is so cheap, because I never pay. I just changed all the locks, have triple bolts on all the doors and just stay here. It’s mine, it’s free and they can’t kick me out because I won’t let them. Why should I pay for the internet when it’s basically flowing free through these wires and air? I just take some from my neighbor. When I go to a coffee shop I just grab the first drink I see that’s on the counter. If they’re not fast enough to take their drink, I take it, it’s just sitting there, it’s free.
I’m not sure whether to agree or not, but he’s got the point in the following sense: if everyone will pirate and never donate to the creator, then the creator will get about zero returns and will likely go make a living doing something else.
So pirate + donate looks like more fair redistribution of wealth, while pirate + no pay looks like being greedy asshole same as corporations
He makes some great points and has some personal examples. He made more money by releasing the album on torrents and asking for donations compared to the normal ways of releasing your music.
If you have enough money to live comfortably, I think you should pay for art you love. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pirate anything (especially from big corps), but please donate some money to indie games, music, theatre…
Heck, I’d say even give money to those big corps so long as they are being reasonable with the price and availability. Reasonable varies by person, of course. But for me, I’ll pay for any $70-90 game (the normal price for new games now in Canada), but stuff like Sims DLC or how the original Mass Effect only let you get DLC through some dumb BioWare credits are cases where I’d pirate no regrets even with my current income.
After all, there won’t be AAA games if people don’t pay for them. I have (mostly) no qualms with big publishers pocketing a significant profit on those games if they get made well. Bigger problem I have is with games that get rushed to the point of impacting quality, but that’s something I see more for changing how you approach that individual title. Stuff like mistreating staff (crunch time) is a bit iffier. I still lean towards giving them my money, since nobody enters the game dev business without knowing it’ll involve crunch and I do want the devs to be rewarded for their hard work with a commercial success (cause that’s unfortunately just how success is measured in our capitalist society).
I’d recommend only buying good / unique / finished games for $90 - buying any game for that much will just encourage them to keep releasing mediocre trash (mostly talking about series like COD, assassin’s Creed, etc.)
Aye, I used to sail the high seas, the hull of my ship gnarly with viruses, adware and malware from some infectious crackers or key-generators.
Then I had money, and started buying my software and my movies and all was good for a time. Then my media consume shifted to mobile devices, but I had Amazon Prime Video as the only really available video-streaming service around and all was good for a time. Then I added Netflix, as it arrived on my countries market and all was good for a time. Then I added Crunchyroll, Disney+ and Hulu and everything sucked, streaming the shows I wanted to watch was suddenly so expensive, no single streaming service had everything I wanted to watch, so I needed to subscribe to them all, costing an amount of money I would not spend on buying those shows.
Now I have unsubscribed from all but two again, but the market is so fractured, there is barely anything interesting on the services I still go to.
So my eyes keep wandering to that old tricorn, the hook and peg-leg, gathering dust on the wall. I can hear the waves crashing and feel the tide rising in my bones. The moneybags have decided to press us for more and more, their greed means no single harbor, not even two are enough to supply our demands. So there is plenty of bounty to be found on the high seas again, big fat galleons full of content otherwise unreachable or too expensive.
Doncha hear it boys? Davey Jones is singing again, calling us back to the sea, put on your VPN, defy the torrents and right your compasses with a good magnet. We did not choose this life, they made us turn to it.
I’ve been pirating for twenty years and you do kind of just stick with it even when you can afford stuff.
That said, when I reinstalled Windows a while ago, I was fannying about for aaaaaages trying to get a cracked version of Office to work when I suddenly realised I could just buy it for a tenner and not have to fuck about 😂 It hadn’t occurred to me before
Yeah office is literally the only thing that’s not worth it. Lifetime office 2019 is like 20 euro. This will die out with the subscription shit taking place though
Yep, it’s likely a sus licence, but when it eventually refuses to work, a quick phone call to MS and they just say “Fuck it, go on then”. Call centre people don’t care where you got it 😅
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.
Just a few days ago I pulled an old Sony’s NWZ player as they still have superior audio quality compared to phones. I had to throw it away after 10+ years as the battery died.
I used to be poor and pirate everything. Then I was making enough money. I got subscriptions and paid for games. But still pirated everything but games because Netflix was just too annoying to use.
Now everything is going to shit. I still make money but I’m going to start pirating way more. This time it will be out of spite !
How do you steal something that is infinitely reproducible?
If you have an apple and I steal it, you cannot eat the apple.
If you have a movie, I can copy it and you can still watch it.
Say for instance, there was a magic apple machine that copied apples infinitely with zero loss. If not intentionally destroyed, access to this machine would be restricted by the first party with enough capital to acquire and protect it. Using the machine to copy apples would also be considered stealing.
You people have recited that bullshit for as long as I can remember usenet. You’ve stolen the right to distribution and taken money out of progress 6 hands.
Invent whatever little story you need to live with it.
In 12 years of being subscribed to Netflix, it did not happen a single time that the movie I tried into the search was available.
I got the subscription as an indulgence. To answer the question, “how will the artists get paid”. But I still get everything from piratebay. Again, because Netflix is crap.
Oh, I didn’t come here to complain about stealing.
I came to make fun of idiots that make it their identity. The ladder is very much open season on piracy forums. You seem to be conflating (and other) the two.
I’ve pirated almost everything for the last 30 years from msdos on. But I wouldn’t say it’s a lifestyle. It’s just that most of the stuff I would never buy. I don’t need them, they are not important, but maybe I want a taste. I don’t pirate music anymore because it’s not practical and some of the software. Some. Games I don’t play much anymore, but I would pirate them until I have like 50 hours in. Then I start thinking maybe it makes sense to buy. Unless it turns out cracked version is better than official one.
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.
Yeah, I basically stopped pirating entirely despite doing it relentlessly early in life. I still owe Capcom a thousand bucks if I am to pay that one alone back.
The basically part is that I still pirate what little music I need. Fuck the music industry.
Because, at the end of the day, we’re basically just downloading commodity entertainment. There’s nothing directly substantive about that and that’s fine. Not everything we do needs to become a direct part of our identity.
Yup. Pirating is about filling a need where companies sorely lack in providing services. When a company provides a shitty service or offers no viable alternative to obtaining something I would gladly pay for, pirating bridges that gap.
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