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.
When I can’t buy it in a reasonable way lol
Simply wanting to save money is a valid enough reason to pirate. The only time you should have any second thoughts is if its a product you REALLY want to see more of or if its made by a smaller group that could really use that money.
Even then though, you can always help without spending money. Easiest way is to spread the word.
You enjoyed that game?
Tell others its a good game worth getting. In many cases, that might help more than buying the game and saying nothing about it.
There was a television show from another country that I wanted to watch. It wasn’t available to stream in my country from the source, and wasn’t available on any other streaming platforms. I even tried making an account, but they wouldn’t accept my credit card because of the billing address.
Pirating that would be justified; the argument isn’t just that, if I can’t buy it then I should be allowed to take it, but that if I can take it without causing financial stress on the artists, then it’s OK. They are refusing my money, so pirating it wouldn’t deprive them of a sale.
I also strongly agree with what others have said, that my ethics require me to purchase something once.
Where I get fuzzy is on the right for producers (studios and distributors) to make profit. Money going to artists is clear to me; and production studios need to fund projects, some if which will fail. But the existing, purely profits-driven, risk-averse, homogenizing movie production industry… I’m not sure I agree that they deserve the lion’s share of the profits.
If a product can be offered without much issue on a pay once and own-as-is forever model, then I think there is an ethical imperative to pirate it.
I would be willing to pay a few hundred bucks for a perpetual license to look 2023 version of Adobe Lightroom. Unfortunately the only place to find such a product is on the high seas. Adobe will only let you buy a subscription based equivalent. I like the actual software product, and I’ve gotten good at using it, but if I can’t just buy it, I’m not going to pay for it.
I actually have a plug-in for Lightroom called topaz Labs AI enhancement suite. I pay for a single year’s worth of updates, but I can still use the software as of the final update forever. If Adobe actually offered something like that I would be all over it.
Hoo boy, opening up a can of worms with this. I’ll give the “hot take” here and don’t bother replying because I’m not going to be drawn into (another) debate. Feel free to downvote away.
I think most piracy is unethical but it depends on exactly what you’re pirating.
The top comment here is about scientific papers. I think that’s also totally unethical unless the research is publicly funded. You are not entitled to that information. It usually requires a large amount of funding and wouldn’t be possible without it.
I think piracy is okay for items that are otherwise unavailable for purchase, or put behind arbitrary hardware limitations (looking at you Nintendo).
Also I pirate from YouTube (ad blockers) because Google is an incredibly unethical company and the official app is abhorrent and even if you pay for Premium the “official” method of watching videos (YT app) is abhorrent and does not respect any of your input on what you actually want to see. There are unofficial apps made by nerds in their Mom’s basement that are 10x better at showing you that, while also respecting your privacy and not logging your activity for use in profiling you and showing ads, so that’s what I use. I budget $30/mo to donate directly to my favorite creators on other platforms.
everything and nothing
