this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2023
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If you're gonna do it, do it, but don't pretend like you're morally right in doing it. For the vast majority of us, we're pirating something we don't need but something we want. Is it hard to acquire? Does it come tied to annoying subscriptions? Does it come from a company you don't like? Is it too expensive? None of these are valid reasons to pirate something because you could just as well enjoy other media that are available to you. Or if you are out of accessible media to you, you could just not enjoy media. Be bored. You're not entitled to access to the things you're pirating.
Don't get me wrong, I understand you, and I empathize. I pirate too, when something I want falls under the conditions I listed above, but I'm under no illusion that it's ethical in some way. There's no ethical consumption under capitalism? Well there's no ethical piracy either. People put work into something and if you use it, you should pay what they ask for it.
I know this is an unpopular opinion, because no one wants to be the bad guy. Pirate if you want to pirate, your reasons are yours, but be honest about it. You pirated something because you wanted it, and you didn't want to not get it, and you didn't want to pay the entry price either. It is what it is.
I won't shed a tear for the entertainment industry, if they make it harder to watch content than it is to pirate there just isn't any point paying, I don't really consume enough content to justify having even one streaming service though. I pay for spotify because its convenient and I pay to go the movies because it offers an unique experience.
Edit: Academic books is something that I pirate even if it's time consuming and inconvenient, because fuck them for swapping two chapters every 2 years to sell more books.
Like I said, you can have your reasons, but that doesn't justify it. Just because the entertainment industry has bad people doesn't mean it's right to pirate. Just do it, but be honest that you're doing something bad, and be fine with doing something bad
My thoughts exactly, thanks for writing this comment. The discourse in here is a bit one-sided
Like I said, it's an unpopular opinion. There's a massive amount of copium around piracy. If you read the other reply to my comment you'll also see that people are totally ok with adversely affecting people they don't like:
And then they justify it with accessibility. But if this media is not accessible to you, then the morally right thing to do is not to access it.
And then they justify the high price, or the poor value proposition. Then don't buy it if you can't or don't want to, but don't pretend pirating it is good
Then sometimes people give examples of when they don't pirate. Because the truth is that they know it's not right, and they want you to see that they're not all bad, right?
As an aside to this, education is something else in my mind. Information, science, education, etc. should be tax funded and freely available to everyone. Access to a specific piece of media isn't crucial to the average Joe, but a specific piece of information can be crucial to literally everyone.