Do you guys see a difference morally? Why or why not?
Educational - Science, Non-fiction books, Online courses, etc.
Entertainment - Games, Movies + TV, Fiction books, etc.
I see no difference. Takes time and effort to write the standard book on electronics and also takes time and effort to produce the new scifi tv series. Both are (different) jobs but I don’t think there is a difference if I pirate one or the other.
Ok, so do you think it’s a good or bad thing to be pirating these things?
Uh. That’s a complicated question. I mean if I were to pirate something instead of buying it… It’d be obviously good for me and bad for the creator. But that question really is a can of worms. I don’t think there is a single, simple yes/no answer to that. Personally I’m leaning more to the “Robin Hood” approach. I’d have less issues taking and copying a multi million dollar hollywood production than doing the same to a small and independent creator. But in practice I might have done both. Copied the textbook my electric engineering professor wrote and downloaded the Lord of the Rings TV series… But I myself also make sure to regularly pay for stuff if I can.
Immoral piracy is the killing of the crew during the hijacking of a ship. There is no moral dilemma in downloading anything.
Educational piracy is even more justified. Knowledge should never be paywalled.
Entertainment companies are morally bankrupt because of how much they take from the people actually doing work to give to CEOs. I don’t care if people get that content for free since nearly none of the revenue will go towards the creators. But they are at least somewhat reimbursing the labor that goes into the content.
The academic journals do not do any work whatsoever and charge absolutely absurd prices for access. They get free peer review from the community, they certainly don’t write any of the content. It is a moral imperative to prevent them from profiting off of other people’s work. Hope they lose all their ill-gotten gains.
When I was poor, I pirated a lot of games, played them and then spread the word.
I can say and do believe I helped sales and increasing popularity.It’s not just a pat on the back. My recommendations had others play games they’d never even heard of and in turn recommended them to others.
Of course, now that I can afford some games and no longer play them at launch, I just stick to “Grab them on a sale! It’s worth it at a smaller price!”
I believe that information and knowledge should be free anyways (at least in a perfect world), because that leads to the betterment of society. Also if you are able to use the knowledge you learn from the things you pirate I think you’ll be able to come back and support those things that got you to where you are.
It’s all food for the mind. And The Jesus had some very compelling views on the morality of copy/pasting food until everybody was fed. CC0
When knowledge is deliberately gated by large entities and the author would give it away for free (scientific papers) is a no-brainer for me. Or when a course requires specific textbooks that costs hundreds of dollars.
I just label entertainment as a form culture and avoid the dichotomy altogether!
If i paid for every required college textbook I would be broke. I’m already broke now, but that’s a different story.
No difference imo
I think most would much rather screw the middleman (Subscription services, publishers, etc) pirate the material, and then send money directly to the creator if they like them.
I don’t like that these businesses can tell you that you’re gonna get something but hide the actual pertinent details like:
- no refunds
- the game isn’t even completed and you’ll have to buy DLC to see the rest
- big streaming company offers this resolution and bitrate but what we don’t tell you is that we don’t guarantee that for every device
People have no problem buying an item as it’s marketed, but when you start fucking with and scamming/tricking consumers is when you really kick the fucking hornets nest.
I’ve also seen others mention that sometimes pirating the material meant more freedom with the content they now own a copy of. With 3rd party self hosted streaming services you can do cool things like watch stuff with your friends, watch stuff when you’re away from home, etc.
There used to be a time prior to throw away consumerism where you bought something and it was yours. You buy a painting? It’s yours to resell. Buy a record? Play it with some friends or sell that too.
A long time ago these greedy piggy middleman stepped in and started inflating with bullshit tactics like reducing your degrees of freedom with your newly owned product.
They want you to believe in this new world where you don’t get physical anything, everything’s restricted, milked until bleeding, leaving everyone wondering why everything “sucks” all of a sudden.
Cough cough, tv, movies, games rn unless made my smaller studios
I’ve got an interesting book for you!
How Music Got Free (nonfic piece about 90s-early 2000s piracy)
I never buy any of the content but I do enjoy consuming content thus from a utilitarianistic point of view, piracy is a moral choice for me. Joking aside, if you can pay for things without a strong financial burden, you should pay.
Anyone should be able to download anything for free, in an ideal world. We don’t live in that world, so I download what I need/want, and pay the creators if I can afford it, in order of how high quality the content was.
That said, I don’t pirate applications, simply because I don’t trust running the code from a random source on my computer. There are FOSS alternatives for all productivity software (except for DAWs, and REAPER has a free ‘trial’), games I generally buy on sale, except for Geometry Dash for Android, which I downloaded the apk for since 1) it’s Android, which is apparently more secure than Linux, and 2) It seemed to have removed from the Google Play Store, or Aurora, or something, and I’d already bought the Steam and iOS versions of the game.
Android = Linux.
In the same way that macOS is Unix.
Android uses the Linux kernel. macOS does not.
Ok, but if it doesn’t have any of the good features of Linux like root or, you know, actual control over your device, does it matter?
Android has root, you just gotta put in a little bit of work, and give up your Google App goodies like RCS chat and Pay. (you can get them working too, but Google’s getting better at detection/blacklisting spoofed device fingerprints making it a cat and mouse pain)
Lol no
