Moved here from lemmy.world. Long live piracy!

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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 16th, 2023

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  • I think this discussion is leading nowhere, but I again want to emphasize the fact that you cannot point to a person and say that their actions specifically led to any harm and thus you cannot (imo of course) morally hold them responsible. As for the second part that was not my point, you are of course right about what you said and I agree with the whole paragraph, I just wanted to show an extreme example of how there is no harm, because there is no way such a person would pay for the content anyways - so yeah, you can just let them not enjoy filet mignon, but why would you when they could eat it with no harm to anyone? And as for the last part I am not stating that piracy is always a clearly good thing, I am just stating that it is ethically neutral in most cases and rarely necessary to save content from being forgotten or for other research purposes, when eg. the scientific articles are locked behind absurd paywalls.


  • Not being aware was a simpler expression to convey “does not have any influence on that person”. And no, it does not harm you. Please explain what difference does it make to you if someone does not buy the game or does not buy the game and pirate it. And better yet, if you think that the comparison should be between a specific human being purchasing the game or pirating for it, please explain how can you prove someone did have the intent to buy the game? Even if so, the person responsible is not the one making a decision to pirate, but the one making it available for piracy. I still disagree with this view of reality, but for me personally assigning more responsibility to the websites offering content rather than the users is a more sensible middle ground. The main problem for me is the idea of a “lost sale”, whereas it is not possible to prove someone was going to buy the product. I’ve even seen some people suggest things like “if you are poor and can’t afford entertainment then you shouldn’t have entertainment”, which is completely absurd, because in this case specifically piracy even more clearly has no negative impact on anyone, and just a positive one for the person unable to afford a product.


  • Sale of revokable for any reason at all licenses to access digital content should be a crime, not piracy. This content can be infinitely reproduced with no harm to the owner, in fact in most cases the owner doesn’t even know that you specifically copied the content. I completely agree that everyone should support creators they like, but I completely disagree that it should be compulsory on often whatever terms the author comes up with to extort as much money as they can.





  • And an important thing I forgot to mention: you assume that piracy is some invisible force that makes customers not buy the product and inflicts purely theoretical losses to the company, while in reality the vast majority of pirates would not buy the product anyways, and some (like me) have bought hundreds of e.g. games, just because they liked the pirates version. Some studies have shown that piracy has a positive net influence on the number of sold copies. Saying that piracy loses sales is just a stupid rhetoric used by greedy callous companies to raise prices even more, though the product does not change.



    1. If you only care about quantity, then sure, go ahead
    2. Then it’s the customers’ fault for still choosing this provider and paying more

    For a living, I mostly write software and do research in mathematics, and yes it should be free. I don’t necessarily say that there should not be an option to pay for using it for business purposes, but in my opinion it should always be possible to easily and legally get it for personal use. I cannot share the code directly due to NDA’s, but it still should be public and accessible for any physical persons.