I am ashamed that I hadn’t reasoned this through given all the rubbish digital services have pulled with “purchases” being lies.
I don’t subscribe to the logic but I guess a part of it can be the lossless factor. Quality of pirated digital content is exactly like the original. If you tape something it usually loses quality. So people seem to care less about that kind of piracy. Which is stupid since going for lossy compressed pirated videos is allegedly not less wrong in the face of law.
Let’s get crazier.
Our current favorite show is Bob’s Burgers, it’s a comfort show we fall asleep to. Prior to signing up with real debrid I got tagged for downloading a 2 year old episode.
We pay for Hulu. We pay for YoutubeTV. We have a working OTA antenna (for when the internet goes out).
My math says I have 3 licenses, yet still illegal to download?
Not to disparage your reply, because it’s well thought out and written, but doesn’t it seem to you we’re hiding behind legalese?
I want to buy a turkey. I have money. I will visit a farm, pay for the turkey (if the price is agreeable to both parties) and I now own that turkey. I will then do whatever the fuck I want with that turkdy, from raising it as my child, to cooking it for thanksgiving, to cloning it if I have the technology. Sure, I might not be able to return it in some cases. But that’s a living fucking thing, and nobody can tell me how to use it.
Now - I want to buy a movie. I have money. I will go to the cinema, but it’s not playing anymore. I will look for it on TV, but it’s only on one channel, only while I’m at work. I will look for it on the internet and it’s available on one website, where I need to make an account and provide quite a lot of information about me. So I make the account and click through their shitty prompts, pay for the movie and now I can only do one thing: stream it?
Excuse you? Who the fuck are you to tell me how I can enjoy my media? What if I want to make a vynil record and listen to it? What if I want to watch it on my old-timey projector? What if I want to burn a frame of the movie onto my morning toast every day for 2000 years? What if I want to put it in a small baggy tied to my balls while I’m fucking the mom of some movie exec, am I supposed to put the entire laptop in the baggy? How the fuck dare you make that distinction for me? Oh, because your site isn’t granting me the right to buy a movie, but to buy a license to watch that movie in whichever conditions you decide? Great - here’s the thing: I have my own license, which says whenever I pay for something, I use it however the fuck I want, and if you attempt to exert any control over my property or how it is used I will literally stab you and bury you in the woods, because I don’t take kindly to corporate fucks who attempt to instruct me how to use the things I’ve bought. Fuck you, you should’ve read my license when you took my money.
There is no “license” here, my dude. I don’t pay for licenses, regardless of what the website wants to charge for. I pay for a product, or a a service. Let’s not hide behind legalese and let’s just acknowledge that these are scummy practices to ensure the wealth of corporations at the expense of the rights of consumers. And until these types of shady “licenses” to temporarily view THEIR PROPERTY are smacked into the fucking ground by consumer-friendly laws, piracy is the only way to have justice in a system stacked against you.
