Piracy is not immoral (sometimes)

super_user_do@feddit.it to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 153 points –

I'll go straight to the point:

  • Piracy is useful to bypass regional frontiers and access to censored content
  • Piracy is helpful to watch content without supporting it if you consider it not worth of it
  • Piracy might be helpful for content preservation and survival
  • Piracy is useful to ACTUALLY evaluate whether to spend money on some digital content or not
  • Piracy is sometimes the only way to actually own DRM-protected content
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Piracy is moral as long as it doesn't hurt actual people, corporations don't count

Most people working on big media productions (movies, shows, games) get a fixed price or salary for doing so. The owners / publishers (maybe also big stars in movies which already are millionaires) get all of the rest when a production sells good.

So by buying / paying for subscription services you only support big c-suite assholes which sit on the rights to media which they have contributed nothing to, except for capital maybe. I won't pay some intransparent big corporation to be able to watch a 10 year old movie / show just to make those people richer.

Piracy is not immoral, but if it's too widespread it can destroy opportunities for people creating things to get paid for creating things, and so they may not be able to continue doing so. And that just makes the world worse.

Try to find a way to support the people that make stuff that you love. For example I won't pirate music from small bands, I only pirate games if they have onerous DRM or something (never indie games), and I'll only pirate books if they're ridiculously overpriced and I can't get a standalone DRM free version.

Just cos you're a pirate doesn't mean you can't have morals.

Can you even buy ebooks these days without going though Amazon? Aside from an incredibly small amount of indie authors (who probably got kicked from Amazon for unknowingly pissing off some algorithm) there's no place to download them and support the authors.

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