this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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Ko-Fi Liberapay
Ko-fi Liberapay

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Hi guys, first of all, I fully support Piracy. But Im writing a piece on my blog about what I might considere as "Ethical Piracy" and I would like to hear your concepts of it.

Basically my line is if I have the capacity of paying for something and is more convinient that pirating, ill pay. It happens to me a lot when I wanna watch a movie with my boyfriend. I like original audio, but he likes dub, so instead of scrapping through the web looking for a dub, I just select the language on the streaming platform. That is convinient to me.

In what situations do you think is not OK to pirate something? And where is 100 justified and everybody should sail the seas instead?

I would like to hear you.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I change laptops frequently. Used to buy songs from iTunes and every time I changed laptops, transferred music over, I'd lose access to them. Would have to go thru insane process to be allowed to listen to the music I'd paid for.

Similar thing would happen with some software, Adobe especially.

If you're going to treat me like a criminal, then I might as well be a criminal. Same with purchasing movies on Amazon.

I tried to pay for minecraft, but 2 hours later, Microsoft wouldn't let me. Kept trying to make me an Hotmail account.

Growing trend in software I'm not happy with. No longer allowed to own the things we buy, and forced to hand over my email, phone number, address, name, create account... used to be, you could just buy things, simply. That was that.

Corporations are getting drunk with power, overreaching, infiltrating people life.

Also, if in poverty, no food, homeless, etc. If I can't afford what I need. And can get it another way, I will

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah that was my first thought too. Anything you've legitimately paid for that the company then takes away or makes extremely difficult for you to access, I think it's perfectly justified to pirate it then.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I had this experience when while I was playing Bioshock Remastered on Steam, 2K Games in their grand wisdom decided to "update" the game after 5 years of neglect. Oh, did they fix remaining bugs or other outstanding technical problems with the game? No. Of course not. They dropped a "Quality of Life Update" to force a 2K games launcher, which immediately made the game unplayable for me because I couldn't get the game to launch anymore. The irony.

So anyway, I had to pirate the game I bought and transfer my saves to finish playing.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I felt the Adobe part. I bought Photoshop CS2 back in the day then sadly lost the license key a few years later. I never felt bad for pirating the latest version.

Another example of ethical piracy would be when offline games force you to be online all the time. Minecraft forces me to be online to play through the official launcher. Since I also play with mods that are still a few versions behind, I downloaded a cracked launcher so I can play even when I don't have internet access.