Asklemmy

When I was a broke-ass college student I pirated a lot of things. When I started working properly and finally had my own means, I started buying basically everything. Then the post-covid world brought a lot of changed to my life and income and I'm a little back on the piracy train.

There's a lot of factors, for me. If I want to support a product, I won't pirate it. I recently picked up Sea of Stars, because it's a small team indie title made with love, and it shows. Likewise, if I am on the fence about something for some reason, I may "demo" it first and if it keeps my attention, I'll end up buying it.

Sometimes there's past experiences that keep me off of some games. I strictly won't buy Ubisoft's PC releases, and haven't played an Assassin's Creed game in years because of that. After every debacle with them, between uPlay, account issues and the performance/quality of their PC ports, they just don't deserve my money.

I pirate to try things, if I like it I pay for it. I have games on Steam with less than an hour played but most achievements unlocked because after finishing the game I purchased it.

I'll stop pirating when creators get paid their fair share. Before that, support them directly or sail the great blue

I have pirated some opera video recordings. It's the only way I'd see some of them. I don't know how to pirate TV or music, and I'd never pirate music anyway because I care a lot about music.

People who say piracy is theft are wrong, actually holders of intellectual property are thieves that are stealing that what should belong to the public domain. When you pirate you make a copy of something, you don't take anything away from the other person. That's fundamentally different from theft. When you force people to pay for a free resource (copying data) you are creating artificial scarcity. To think that construction is helping society in any way is fooling yourself. It's very clearly limiting human creativity and freedom. Allowing people to do with it as they please free of charge would allow for better ideas and applications to emerge. When someone comes up with an idea (a medicine, product, song, whatever) they claim it as theirs and no-one can touch it. Look at it this way: someone invents the wheel. The wheel is a concept that is out their, waiting to be discovered by someone. Before it was discovered it was readily available for anyone to discover, but than someone finally invents it and suddenly he can claim it as his? Is the first one to discover the moon, the one who owns it? Ultimately songs and books and such are not fundamentally different. Also, no-one writes a songs out of nothing, you build upon the ideas of others. You walk the path, use all the stepping stones laid down by others, it brings you to a point and suddenly it's all yours? It doesn't make any sense at all, but we're so used to it that we can't see it for what it is. It's a scam. It's a monopoly and it doesn't belong in a free society. You should support creators and be thankful for their efforts, that's why trademarks should exist, if you want to buy the copy from the author himself you should know which product to buy through the trademark, which one is by the original creator and which copies are from third-parties. But all other intellectual property is theft from the public domain.

I do.

Nope, not really.

Life's about more than money.

I think pirates are cool but the download links they put to make you download viruses are not cool

I like stealing

Generally stuff like Steam games I'll pay for, especially now that I can afford it. I have no qualms with people pirating things if they can't afford it, like teens, students, between jobs, on social security, people living in a country with an undervalued currency. To me it's not stealing, it's expanded access to knowledge, and unlike stealing benefits companies who get much better reach and recommendation than if the price tag (or stupid DRM) stopped them from trying.

When I do pirate something, I often treat it as a demo, like I can play the game to get the feel but no/limited networking features, no updates etc.. I don't like having to pay and refund something if I was just going to try it out. If a friend wants an idea of how a game is like, I give them a copy I bought after removing DRM if I can. Often times they go and buy their own copy because it's a cool game, when they don't it probably wasn't interesting enough to complete.

Sometimes there are just too many middlemen taking a cut here and there that I would rather obtain something in contravention of copyright then provide value back to the creator more directly if I could. Steam, a rare exception for me, justifies their value through their robust update, social, modding, Linux supporting ecosystem.

I pirate and I think doing so should be legal and accepted. It's one thing to have a copyright for profitable uses of some content, a whole other much crazier thing to say copyright forbids sharing that content for free. File sharing should be thought of the same way as letting your friend borrow your book - just a normal and uncontroversial nice thing to do, that you shouldn't avoid based on some concern it will lead to lower book sales.

Nowadays, not a whole lot. I have more money than I have media consumption time, no matter the type. There are still exceptions for situations where nobody wants my money, where I also feel that even calling it a form of "theft" is a bit rich simply because... what potential sale or income is being lost? Nobody wants to make money with it! I'd happily pay, it's just that there's no one there to receive the money!

Yes.

When I feel like doing it.

Even assuming I were a billionaire, my guideline is: Company acts nice? Take my bucks. Scummy practices, fragmentation, region locking, etc? Sail the seas

I pay for my audiobook streaming because it doesn't cost so much and you cannot pirate the books I listen to anyway

I want? I pirate. It loses no value. If the price is right I'll support smaller guys when I can, but shit is only getting more expensive, so I support less these days.

Shits getting expensive and I'm not getting richer. I think I'd be stupid to not pirate.

Shit really is getting expensive.

I don't pirate video games. Steam, Gog, or even epic are easy and not too expensive. Steam's refund policy isnt terrible.

I don't pirate music. I buy stuff from smaller artists on Bandcamp, and use free Spotify/YouTube/old stuff I ripped myself from CDs (I'm old). Though honestly I don't have a problem with pirating music that's like 10+ years old. Copyright law is too long.

I don't pirate books. I get them from the library.

I may have downloaded some RPG books because I wanted more of a skim than I could find online, didn't really trust reviewers to have my exact set of preferences, and didn't want to pay the whole amount for a game I wasn't sure I'd like. The ones I did like and use I bought.

I don't really watch anything so it didn't even occur to me to list it.

When I was younger (< 25) I would pirate loads - music, films, tv shows, games etc. The main driver was that I was poor and wouldn't have paid for them anyway, but also it was convenience , streaming services weren't around yet so it was the only way to consume digital products.

Now that I'm older and have a decent salary, I don't do it anymore. I'm happy to pay for Spotify and have a really easy experience, or use Amazon or Netflix. I don't play PC games anymore either. The only act of piracy I do now will be the very odd occasion where I watch to watch a full F1 race that I missed, but the service that I pay for might not have uploaded the race for up to 24 hours later. I don't want to wait because I run the risk of coming across spoilers and I'm eager to watch what happened, and seeing as I'm already paying for the service to watch the race I don't see what the issue is by seeing it a bit earlier.

Also, have you ever noticed that you have felt that the value of a product has decreased just because you didn’t pay for it, thus you are less interested to read it?

I think what you might be referring to is the Paradox of Choice -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice