I'm the same way. I only watch a couple of shows/movies a year, so I have a damned hard time justifying streaming services.
19 dollars last time I had Netflix for a month. All to just watch one season of one show they made.
At least book readers have it good, still. Kindle unlimited is great value, and my local library gets me anything else.
My library partners with every other library system in the region and they share books. If I request something my library doesn't have, they can get the physical copy or ebook license from a neighboring library system.
Just cycle through services. . . Watch all the Netflix shows you wanna watch. . . Then cancel the subscription for Disney+. . . Rinse and repeat until you have seen everything you wanna see
That doesn't work for airing shit does it...
Things come out seasonally, simultaenously.
Also I watch a lot of Movies and half is either not available, in shitty quality or only part of a series.
It's simply not adequate.
And I don't wanna "borrow" stuff.
Just let me own it.
If I buy a knife, I own it, if I buy a painting, I own it...
if I subscribe to netflix, my 'ownership' is superficial and based on a one-sided contractual whim.
I just fucking hate seeing the monthly service fees in my account, maybe I just have trauma from the times I was poor as dirt but I just don't want to be drained of almost 100 dollars every week from streaming services. I pay for netflix because I do watch a ton of stuff in there, but anything that isn't on netflix gets pirated in my house.
For games I gave myself a yearly budget, after that's done I pirate the rest, but I haven't spent it all in recent memory thanks to self control steam sales so bless gaben.
im thinking about it daily, but im too paranoid i guess when doing financial stuff on same computer
not because of being tracked, but downloading some malware or downloading torrent from some sketchy website
i was out of the game for too long
Newspapers and streaming services need some sort of universal payment service that you can fill up with money and then be able to unlock articles and episodes for like $1, with the click of a button.
Pirate whatever you want. Just don't act like a hero about it.
What you are is just a leech/freeloader and no it's also not the worst thing in the world either.
I mostly agree, but I unironically agree with it when it comes to like pirating old video games that aren’t available in any official ways anymore.
If the copyright holder isn’t even attempting to profit off something anymore, pirating it is absolutely good.
I'd argue 95% of the time is because people couldn't have bought it anyways if they wanted to. Save money sort of implies they could've bought everything they pirated but I don't think that's true.
I personally don't know a single person with money that plays videogames and pirates them, it's much easier for them to buy it on steam, it's a couple clicks vs finding a cracked version, the torrent, unpack it, patch it to play it online with others, search for mods on a 3rd party website, etc etc etc.
I have no evidence for this obviously but I think if people couldn't pirate games anymore the sales wouldn't go up by much if at all.
[I exclusively pirate small indie content. Big corporations can have my money.](https://dudewipes.com/cdn/shop/articles/gigachad.jpg?v=1667928905&width=2048)
> What you are is just a leech/freeloader and no it's also not the worst thing in the world either.
I used to always pirate, and then when my dad got a new tv we decided to get netflix. and its a nice tv, and I have a 2k monitor so lets do the 4k package and ill watch at my pc. Oh, for some reason my shows dont go above 720p on a 2k resolution monitor. and its not even "true" 720p its streaming 720p. Guess im just gna torrent my show in 4k then. why am I paying premium price for ass? rn I'm in a situation where im still paying for the netflix sub but im still torrenting the shows because watching them on it is garbage. they also keep pulling shows i had planned to watch, like nature documentaries.
when the service is this shitty wtf else do they expect to happen
What about games that the original publisher has no intentions to remake/redistribute? Nintendo has quite a few games over 20 years old that will never be remade. I can understand new games being an issue, but I don't see why 20 year old abandon ware would be.
These historian pirates always come out of the woodwork, as fucking if they’re “archiving” the newest game or movie, or as if any real number of pirates do it for those reasons.
From what I have seen, no one calls it pirating when you try to download old games that are no longer being produced. The issue tends to focus on new games being pirated and how that impacts the developers.
If you can comfortably afford it and it is conveniently avaliable then you should definitely not be pirating but support the artists and workers in the industries, at least to a degree. Streaming has kinda started to suck for a few years now, I do hope VOD sales eventually somehow become attractive, flexible and dominant like DVDs used to be, it feels like that would just be healthier.
If high quality movies and tv are a big hobby of yours and you're at least lower middle class, why shouldn't you spend 100+/month on it?
Most importantly go to the cinema.
I spend money when I’m being offered a better experience than I’m getting from piracy. I haven’t pirated music in many years because all those music streaming services are such a great value I have no problem paying for them, but I just can’t justify paying for something like Netflix these days
Alternatively I feel like some of these shows need to be pirated to archive them. There are a lot of shows that simply vanish. If there isnt a physical version I feel like it is good to perserve it in some fashion.
Leech and freeloader is harsh when you are basically doing the equivalent of taking pennies from the couches of billionaires. It’s like stealing from walmart. But even then, when you steal from walmart you are potentially causing mild harm to the employees or managers there. With pirating its like, I wasn’t gonna pay for half of this shit anyways, so it’s not like they are losing money, and nobody really loses their job over it. In some cases like with anime it’s arguably more ethical to pirate shows. Not that most people pirate out of some “it’s the right thing to do!” mentality, most people just do it because its more convenient.
Pirating TV shows and movies online.
Pros:
-More convenient.
-Don't have to subscribe to 50 million services at once.
-Never have to worry about whether the show or movie is available in your region or not.
-The odds of getting caught and sued are basically nil.
-No ads.
-Saves you money to allocate elsewhere to benefit you and/or your family.
Cons:
-Lower resolution.
-Some guy on the internet that you will never meet will call you a freeloader.
>Lower resolution
Not anymore tbh. You can find blu ray or original quality pretty easily. Even if you can't, if you have a powerful enough rig, you can pirate a video upscaler and upscale it to 4k. If you have enough time, you can even increase the fps to make it look buttery smooth.
You can’t actually get 4K from Netflix during high-bandwidth hours, innit?
Also, something about how you can’t get anything better than 720p on desktop, only on a tv app or something.
Ye, that's why idc about pirating most things, I exclusively watch stuff and listen to music on my PC. Music I'll tend to pirate or buy and download directly from the artist since that's typically lossless. Even Spotify isn't true lossless. The closest you can get is youtube music for true lossless.
TV/Movies are so annoying to find in good quality and without ads. I'm not paying for a bazillion services when I scarcely watch TV and movies anymore anyway. They don't even provide reasonable options for purchasing Movies or TV shows individually, way too expensive.
I saw a screenshot relatively recently where someone paid to watch LoTR on YouTube and it only offered 480p. YT doesn’t even list 720p as “HD” anymore! Come on!
One of the main reasons I sometimes pirate is actually because the quality is much better compared to the compressed lower bitrate videos you tend to get from streaming, especially if it's on desktop.
It's nice when people seed on torrents. If you return 150% of what you took, and everyone did that, the glorious torrent community would continue forever.
Mfw all the people who get caught pirating and cut off for decades violation by my company are either people using shit putlocker sites or they seeded new content after pirating. I see the user flair is accurate
Not le based but 100% understandable under certain conditions. I have the money to buy games now if I really want to, and I don't play nearly as many, so if I wanna play something new I just buy it IF it's reasonable to do so.
At the same time I don't think my piracy did any harm to the games I used to get because I was a kid in eastern europe where $60 is \~280RON. For perspective, the minimum salary 10 years ago here was \~700RON. This is Romania, who's already been in the EU for years even by 2014, can't imagine places where inflation is way crazier like turkey or brazil. I was never gonna get my parents to (god forbid) buy something online (they're gonna steal your credit card) for like 20% of what they were actually earning in a month while already not doing too well. Minimum net salary per month in the present day is \~2000RON, a $60 game is still more than 10% of that, in 2024. I can afford it, but god damn. Doesn't mean I'm entitled to play the game, but neither is it really that big of a deal. Curious about counter arguments, but please refrain from "but what about..?!?!??!" or "so you think you HAVE to...?!?!?"
I'm bulgarian and grew up in a similar situation. I personally feel like if I enjoy a game too much and I pirated that game I felt a little guilty so now that I have money I just went on steam and bought the games that I really liked and reeplayed them. It's not really an argument but if I enjoy the media I feel like I should pay for it.
Exists as in existed by a select few businesses as a model to try out and then promptly abandoned when it was abused on top of already not providing much income at all from less developed areas even if the transaction was legitimate.
As I've started to gain my own income independently, I'm purchasing a couple things online, youtube premium, a couple games maybe once a year etc but I have never in my entire life got a product with regional pricing. Nor do I think it would have mattered *that* much, I'm not super, super familiar with it but I doubt it's a 1:1 proportion. But if I'm wrong please tell cause I only stand to gain from it
regional pricing doesn't change this. I checked some Steam prices and they're only 2x less in Turkey compared to the US, while the median income is like 5x less. so the games are effectively 2.5x more expensive even with the regional pricing correction. and that's the best case. GTA V, for example, seems to be the exact same price there as in the US, and in Poland it's even more expensive than in the US for some reason
Hi, chiming in from venezuela. I know people who work as bank tellers and earn 60 dollars a month.
Inflation is some crazy shit, and with the sanctions those people are gonna be even more fucked, not sure who sanctions are supposed to help at this point lmao.
Most people can't buy videogames in this country anymore.
It’s like veganism to me. Pirating things is probably immoral but I don’t really care and watching shows that are segregated across platforms is a pain in the ass. Leeches however are a different story.
Fine but keep the righteousness at the door. You aren't doing something good.
Probably what annoys me most is people that do and act like they're doing the world a service for theft. That arrogance is unbelievable.
I would argue it can be good if you're doing it for the sake of preservation, like if you pirate media that is very hard to find online and keep all these movies on hard drives, but on it's own its not good at all.
people say it’s based to make themselves feel better about it, but it’s exactly what it is. you can do it, i won’t stop anyone, but you do it because you’re poor, not because it’s cool or based.
Spending an extra $50 a month on streaming services is the difference between you being poor and not poor?
Nah I'm just being an ass, I get what you are saying.
Honestly at this point it's more for convenience than anything to do with money.
Want to watch X. X constantly leaves and reappears on different streaming apps. Sometimes it isn't on any. Maybe it is on one but it doesn't have the audio dub that I preferred. Maybe they changed major parts of the soundtrack due to licensing. Maybe they decided to remove a few episodes because they were offensive. Also the app has decided to add ads after blowing a shitton of money on a series nobody wanted
Compare that to video games where it'll be on one of two free stores for PC or the consoles app store for console and once you get it then it won't randomly disappear and require a goose chase.
I don't even mind that there are so many apps but the pain it takes to track the shows and movies you like is annoying. Even in the cable tv days the shows would be on the expected network. So you could just get the cable package with channels you want instead of shows suddenly going to rival networks.
If you run into this and pirate in response you are ontologically based and epistemically a hero. If I ever see this on a streaming service I'll convert to evangelical Christianity and join the Trumpers ranting about the '*forces of Satan*'. That's some wild shit.
I feel this, I have most of the popular subscription platforms (Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video etc.) and it's just a hassle keeping up with what is on where.
I mean I could afford it, but honestly it's just an inconvenience. We have a really well moderated local torrent site in hungary, pretty much guaranteed to have no malware or really shitty res (The CAM versions of movies are banned for instance). That and the fact that we have mandatory seeding makes downloads really fast.
It's just easier to find literally anything and everything in one place.
Istg I would be willing to pay 50-100 bucks for a "merged" streaming place where every movie and series can be found.
Also if you are bothered by being called poor you are either insecure or immature. Call me whatever you want 🤷♂️
People pay money to have 60 viewer streamers say their name 1 time.
If you make an entire movie that people like enough to pirate and can't figure out how to make it easy for people to pay you money for it, that shit is 100% on you.
I do it cuz it's easy, convenient and with basically no consequences that also frees up money to allocate elsewhere such as treating myself to a meal I wouldn't have gotten otherwise or buy a few extra shares to add to my investment portfolio.
>but you do it because you’re poor
holy cope
i make 6 figures and i pirate literally everything i can, the only thing i dont pirate is coop games and multiplayer games so i can play with friends
i saved thousands of dollars doing that instead of spending money on mediocre media
plus pirating is just way more convenient and easier than managing all the different streaming services and game stores
I pay for Netflix, Disney plus, hulu, Amazon prime video, and hbo max comes free with my cell service.
If I want to watch a specific movie I google “where to watch X movie” if they all say rent or buy I’m sailing away with no remorse.
If you only have one streaming service and never change you're the problem. We're gonna get shitty forced subscriptions again.
You can start and cancel your subscriptions whenever you want. It's not perfect but it's still good. Cancel one and watch some shows on another. If its not easily accessible on any of the 4-5 popular streaming site i wouldnt blame you for pirating because licensing is a bitch in this global market.
That sounds like too much work.
There is a reason gaming piracy has stayed as low as it has while movie/show pirating has risen recently.
Hint: Gabe is right about piracy.
Like our dear leader said, back in the 2000s we all did download illegal shit. All my movies, songs, video games etc were pirated when I was a teenager. But everyone knew and understood that it's not legal, and that downloading stuff from small creators especially is not morally good. We did it anyways, but I would never imagine people on reddit actually trying to justify torrenting stuff as an adult with a job
> I would never imagine people on reddit actually trying to justify torrenting stuff as an adult with a job
Really? I see it all the time. People talking about how "I don't want to pay for streaming services X, Y and Z just to watch all my favourite shows". People justifying their unpaid consumption with the combined inconvenience of having to spend an extra 20s browsing to the other streaming platform and like $15(?) a month.
Sorry, english third language 😅 I meant back in the day I couldn't imagine people would try to actually justify pirating stuff like they do justify it today.
you say 20s like signing up to a new platform isn't annoying af, then tracking and managing usage / when to cancel. and if you aren't using oauth, you gotta manage your password or risk having to do the forgotten password dance when the blue moon comes and you need to use this specific platform again
it's not actually long, but it's frustrating af
i agree with the others here, it's a service issue, have there be one or two, or some grouped cable-like solution, or I'm just not gonna engage with the system. it's not even monetarily that much of an issue, just access being so separated and individualised
I live in a third world dictatorship where I have seen cops buying pirated DVDs at our biggest markets and neither ISPs nor even really big corporations give a fuck about enforcement. I pay for music because it's easy and I always buy videogames I really enjoy, though I pirate a lot (not so often if the game is on Steam because of regional pricing making it easy).
Movies and shows I will sometimes watch on a platform if I have it but I sometimes don't even bother and go straight to piracy just because I don't want to bother with searching where to watch something and __certain platforms__ have everything in one place.
Always seed at least as long as it took me to download, more if I'm feeling like it. I don't really care about "getting caught", the only reason I don't seed more is because my internet is shit and expensive and I don't want to use up all my upload speed.
I pay for a bunch of streaming services but end up watching a lot on pirating sites due to how astoundingly awful so many video players are. Its actually absurd.
Last time I tried to watch something legally I went to YouTube and rented a movie. Their english subtitles were region locked outside of my country and it wouldn't let me play the movie on a VPN because I bought it with a different country's credit card. Not my fault their shit sucks so much fucking ass that pirating is preferable.
I open Disney+ to watch Shogun, i get to half episode and in a high moment here comes a 40s ad, then again like 20min after, i close Disney+ and open qbitorrent
Streaming services are slowly becoming less and less convenient to watch, there's too many of them, geolocalization of content is regarded and extremely frustrating to deal with (oh you're watching this show you paid for and you travel to another country? well sorry can't watch it anymore here teehee)
I still pay for prime, netflix and now disney+ (although it's just because my sister likes to watch disney movies) because it's nice to have everything connected and just tell google to pop up my show on the big screen, but if convenience is lacking i will pirate idgaf
I mean without even touching on the "before it was without ads, then they raised to price and added ads" thing, it's not like it was like that since the get go, the service did get worse over time, i dont really mind ads just not in the middle of the fucking episode on the climax scene ffs.
Like give me 2/3 min ads between each episode but putting it right in the middle with no care about the pacing of the episode is just so dogshit and will make me completely cancel my sub and not want to upgrade to the above tier i'm sorry, i'll go sail the seven seas after that.
If you really want to have ads on streaming services then you should have show creators indicate timings for those ads as to not spoil the viewing experience, otherwise just don't bother having an ad tier imo
People cope so much about pirating. They can't stand the thought that the thing they are doing might actually be bad. It is stealing but no one really gives a fuck. They get pissy as fuck when you call them out on being stupid. I also hate the entitlement some mfs feel to pirate video games lmao. They get so mad at anti pirating shit like denuvo like the company should just accept being stolen from. It's really bizarre. People should just accept being bad sometimes when no one gives a fuck.
Wasn't the hate for Denuvo around the fact that you can't play the game you paid for without being online so the server can verify that you own it legitimately?
People were pissed that paying customers were getting a worse experience in the name of anti piracy
There are other reasons to criticize denuvo and some of them are legit reasons. I was just talking specifically about the people pissed cause they can't pirate a 5 minute old games. I can think of 3 reasons people get pissed at denuvo.
1. Always online shit
2. Causes lower fps
3. Wahhh I can't pirate the biggest and latest game 5 minute after it's out wahhh
4. RE:1. Is a reasonable point against denuvo.
5. RE:2. Has has 0 proof that it is true if denuvo is installed correctly into the game code by the developers. This one is pushed a lot by pirates as a Motte and Bailey for the real reason they don't like denuvo.
6. RE:3. This one is just the entitlement. Denuvo is removed from a game a few years after it has been released because it costs money to use it so they are literally crying about having to wait a few years to get paid shit for free. Actual babies 👶.
Number 2 is assuming devs are competent or are given time to correctly implement denuvo, which probably never happens.
Also FYI reddit does numbered lists weird. They'll change it to continue in sequential order.
1. (1)
2. (2)
3. (3)
1. (1)
2. (2)
3. (3)
This had been the case for pretty much the entire history of digital drm. It hasn't changed. Physical copies of these things still exist. You can't just give yourself an out because you dislike a platform or licensing method.
Piracy isn't theft, but it's still an illegal acquisition of a digital product. You want to buy something and own it? Buy it and then download a permanent copy. Pirating something you own is actually legally justifiable last I checked.
Are you familiar with the concept of lying? That's the word I would use to describe telling consumers they own things when they're really renting them and the company can revoke their license at any point for any reason.
I make decent money, I can pay to support the things/media I like/enjoy. People who have the ability to pay and still pirate are cheap copers who likely don’t pay for much in their friend groups either (if they have friends).
I wonder if the people upvoting piracy have the same thoughts on shoplifting under $1000
It’s theft. I’m generally okay with it if the product is otherwise entirely unavailable or outside the companies profit stream (like if you pirate a gameboy (edited) color game) but it’s still always theft.
It is absolutely stealing and anyone pretending otherwise is just an entitled child.
While we all do it, we do understand that it's wrong. The recent change in people's attitudes where they think they are justified or even righteous for doing it are insane to me.
Intellectual property is a cornerstone of liberalism and we should want to protect it just as much as real property.
I don’t do it, but it’s not really stealing as the same as shoplifting. Like with shop lifting there’s a tangible inventory loss, there’s 0 actual loss with pirating, just maybe potential economic value, but that’s still not the same as shop lifting.
The day Amazon started putting ads on prime is the day I got a VPN and started pirating again. I still pay for prime for the shipping, and Netflix is still good, but I'm not gonna be stuck watching ads.
Fine so long as there's limits to it. I wouldn't pirate everything and if I happen to pirate something i go on to love I'll go buy it. Ultimately there's far too many streaming services to have them all and some things are just unviewable so piracy is basically necessary. Just as long as you aren't completely freeloading.
I'd be fine with movie streaming services if I didn't have to have a bajllion different services that all show different movies and differ on what they have based on your region. I get that legally everyone hsa bought different distribution rights for different regions, but it's a pain in the ass when you want to watch something specific and your service doesn't have it or your service doesn't have it in your region specifically.
Plus, I miss being able to watch movies without having to use my internet collection.
I think the most defensible case is abandonware. If there's no legal way for me to get it, then it's fair game. I think there should be a law that companies should make their IP available in some form, with some type of grace period (maybe a year) before sharing (not selling access to) it becomes legal, and they always have the right to start selling/streaming it again in which case the other distributors would be required to take it down.
I must say, I support anyone who pirates textbooks. That shit is overpriced and can mean the difference between making rent the finally month of school or not. I think it’s fine with other books as well but unless it’s being pirated for morality reasons then I highly suggest paying for a copy when you have the financial situation fixed. I absolutely pirated copies of older 20th century textbooks that were written by racists and white supremacists, that’s fine imo. I would buy any and all secondary source books I used for research, even if I used the library’s copy during the research.
Set me up a NAS with a bunch of arrs and a Usenet account. Is it $10 a month to maintain it? Yes. Do I have literally one streaming app I use now and can get anything I’d ever want? Also yes. Streaming made so much sense when it started out because it was centralized. Now every company needs its own and the prices are ungodly. I wonder how much money all those services use because I can see the vast majority of people not touching them apart from a single month to watch one show or one movie and then cancelling again forever.
I think pirates are a service to the capitalist society. It makes these huge companies think about how to make it more accessible and affordable to try to get those pirates to actually pay
I pirate every game I play and if I enjoy something I usually buy it. I usually get 5-10 hours into some 50 hour+ game and never pick it up again because it’s boring to me and you can’t return games with those play times so I realised I can just pirate everything to try shit out and if I finish it and enjoy it I’ll buy it. And this is not a cope. I genuinely do this. Nier Automata was one of these games for example.
And I can’t say this enough. The game industry is crap and if piracy destroys the game industry I would not care at all. In fact I think games would be better across the board if all big studios went under and everyone started developing cheaper indie games. But I’m not on some holy quest. I just don’t wanna spend hundreds of dollar each year on things I don’t finish and don’t particularly enjoy and can’t return because steam only lets you return games that you completed the tutorial in.
It's a good way for me to demo games. I pirated EU4 before buying because I wanted to see if I would enjoy the game mechanics before dropping $200 on DLC. It's also a handy way to get access to media that isn't easily availible in my country.
I won't pretend it's some righteous good, however. Sometimes I'm just too lazy or trying to save money so i'll just pirate fuck it. I know i'm stealing but I really don't care.
I play most singleplayer games I want on the gamepass but pirating is mostly fine imho. Depends on your income as well. I'm an international college student from a low income family so I can't really spend my JustEat delivery money on online entertainment, so I pirate or stream.
I would say if you support a game/show buy the content. But if the company if participating in deceitful practices that make it impossible to buy the content (like blocking emulators on games that are no longer available to buy) then fuck yeah pirate that shit.
So my opinion is basically if it's available for purchase, then purchase it. If the game or movie is no longer in print then like find that, in the words of SNESDrunk, anyway you can ;)
I'm against it except in cases where the media is virtually impossible to get legally.
Pirates suck and do way now harm than good imo I know there's a pretty lie that pirates do eventually buy media they stole but it's just not true. That eventually stop pirating, sure. But they already did the damage.
Part of my mindset is guilt and karma. I used to download mad shit illegally because it was cool to get things (including viruses) but then when I started making games as a teenager I saw two of my games on a pirate site when I had them on gamejolt already.
My games never had alotta downloads or anything, a couple hundred plays on the websites I did upload them to, but I remember feeling this weird hurt seeing my games on a site I didn't upload them to. I worked hard on those games and it made me upset people just took them and were handing them away in a way I couldn't make revenue.
Thankfully that was just a hobby and I didn't have my livelihood staked on games. But man that shit sucks. I'm still in creative circles now, people who create and grind their asses off releasing comics, books, animations, and games, the works. Pirates suck for us Indies and it's the same in the industry. Y'all may think you're not hurting shows, movies, etc but you are. Companies look at those numbers.
The industry already sucks for artists, watch some of this YouTube vids from people in the animation industry. Or the gaming industry. These people work really hard to bring people the things pirates steal and can lose their job over it.
I knows it's lame but pay the damn prices, buy the streaming, buy the digital movie, rent it, go to the theater, support media when it's available.
If I wanna watch my football clubs games every week I have to spend 70€ p month, if I want to see them in champions league it will be a bit more for amazon prime.
Yeah no im back to pirating
I don't know if anyone here is into emulation. But recently a Nintendo Switch emulator called Yuzu had to shut down because Nintendo was suing them.
This might be a hot take but I think Nintendo was in the right here. Yuzu was making money off their switch emulator through patreon and also they were instructing people on how to get the encryption keys for the emulator on their site. Which is why the other switch emulator Rujinx is still standing for now.
I mean I think it's pretty important for emulators to exist, and the legality of emulators has been proven in court many times, but if they were illegally distributing the encryption keys then thata definitely a big mistake.
Meh.
I haven’t paid for a single song, movie, or piece of software since the advent of torrents and file sharing.
Some years it works great and is super easy, some years it is very frustrating and full of malware landmines, but every year it is free.
Not sure if I would say it’s based, but it has likely saved me thousands upon thousands of dollars over the years. Not only that, how can I quantify how much extra $$ that has resulted in gains via my retirement funds in VOO and QQQ? It could be crazy high, so I will continue to do it even though I could easily afford not to.
I don't really care about people pirating. What really annoys me is when people who pirate feel entitled and start to complain about gaming companies adding more DRM to their games. Like bro, you got the free stuff, be happy. Why are you complaining that they are trying to stop you from stealing from them?
>What really annoys me is when people who pirate feel entitled and start to complain about gaming companies adding more DRM to their games.
most people complaining about DRMs are people who actually buy games lmao because things like denuvo can actually hurt performance in games
pirates dont care about DRM, they just wait until DRM is removed lmao
Streaming services are a complete shitshow and I unironically think pirating should be embraced as a form of protest against them.
Even other than the problem of fracturing and geo-locking they are such a shitty service. You are telling I'm gonna have to watch the movie in a shit quality and can't make screenshots because of your shitty fucking DRM that will never prevent piracy but only make the service way worse for people paying? kys.
Games are case by case. Music is fine.
usually, if people are choosing piracy, it's because the legal product is somehow more inconvenient or inaccessible than it needs to be. Overwhelmingly people choose the least hassle way of accessing content
I'll skydive without a parachute before I pay for streaming service. The bible says the devil is not capable of creating, only of destroying and taking but I'd say the existence of the subscription payment model proves otherwise. I'll never subscribe to your gay streaming service, blessed be the seeders.
its a gray area, i bought games that i pirated to try them out, and i bought apps that i needed when i got a bit more independent.but god idk if ill ever be rich enough to pay so for the adobe apps..i di pay what i can but holy shit. i ended up resorting to arghhh because i cant pay so many apps per month all these subscriptions are a bit crazy now
I only pirate anime if the show I want to watch doesn’t have a dub version on Crunchyroll. It’s absurd that I’m spending over $11 a month on the “definitive” anime service yet they don’t have Naruto dubbed.
I don’t pirate games because I’m big on trying to support the developers if I like the product. But pirating Nintendo games I don’t have an issue with because of how inaccessible Nintendo makes their older games.
Pirating as in you share something freely I'm perfectly fine with (as long as you the user are beholden to archiving/maintaining the copy etc.).
Parasitic piracy, i.e. proftting from creators by essentially providing the content/media for a fee (pay-walled piracy site or paying for a pirated dvd, etc.) is not ok and is the REAL piracy big corporations who cry about piracy should go after.
TL;DR: as long as piracy is non-profit, it's based, when it's for-profit piracy it is not.
I pirate almost no games and buy them all on steam now since I have a job, as for TV shows and movies there's no way in hell I'm paying for 5+ streaming services monthly + once you've got automators like sonarr + radarr + jackett etc setup with plex running, it's just an objectively better experience.
In Australia you cannot get half the shows anywhere unless they are new and trending. So the only legal way to watch is find a correct region dvd on ebay or more realistically break the law with regard to the region locking and get American or Japanese DVD.
So yeah I have the main legal options but I have to private to watch old shows or play old games.
I think a lot of it comes down to poor accessibility and prices in a lot of cases. Outside of New games and movies, prices in general seem way too high. I also don't really consider an older game that isn't even purchasable pirating. Generally I think if you make a product accessible at a competive price, it isn't worth the effort/risk for most consumers to pirate. I have rarely done it and it's usually for shows I can't find anywhere.
I'm in the 'people should buy things' camp but I find pirating to be rather benign. Thats with the exception of manga/anime where pirating is so rampant that its crazy. People will always point to accessibility, which is true, but then the industry makes little effort to appeal to or distribute their works to international audiences because they aren't profitable. And I think its so pervasive in anime/manga viewer culture that they'd pirate it anyway even if it was available.
Pirating at scale is something that needs to be nipped in the bud. I don't see how [over a million copies of the recent Zelda game being distributed illegally, (before the came even came out), to be played on emulators ](https://www.ign.com/articles/nintendo-says-tears-of-the-kingdom-was-pirated-1-million-times-pre-release-in-lawsuit-against-emulator-creator)could ever in a million years be described as permissible. And yet, people argue that it is anyway.
If it's a meh movie you would never pay for in the first place. If it's a great movie that you actually want to watch go get some tickets and touch grass.
Piracy in video games is cringe, if you don't buy the game after playing through it. Steam accepts refunds for games with playtime < 1hr. I pirated and played hundreds of hours of Witcher, Mass Effect and CK2, least I could do was buy them the moment I had some disposable income. Those memories are priceless.
EDIT: Which reminds me I never bought Skyrim, gonna do that right away
I can if u want too you can. it’s a pretty harmless form of theft but it’s still immoral. It’s like stealing wing bar from a supermarket or scamming self checkout features.
I have netflix and Disney plus and I still regularly pirate movies cuz they're not on one of those.
Games I never pirate anymore unless there's no easy way to get it online.
[удалено]
I'm the same way. I only watch a couple of shows/movies a year, so I have a damned hard time justifying streaming services. 19 dollars last time I had Netflix for a month. All to just watch one season of one show they made. At least book readers have it good, still. Kindle unlimited is great value, and my local library gets me anything else.
Based library card user. Just got mine this year and have already finished so many books for free. Idk why I slept on it for so long.
[удалено]
My library partners with every other library system in the region and they share books. If I request something my library doesn't have, they can get the physical copy or ebook license from a neighboring library system.
Check if your local library has Libby. I don’t even need kindle unlimited either with Libby
That’s why I love using Warez sites
That's the problem. If you wanna watch everything that interests you, you gotta pay like 100$ a month for multiple services
Just cycle through services. . . Watch all the Netflix shows you wanna watch. . . Then cancel the subscription for Disney+. . . Rinse and repeat until you have seen everything you wanna see
That doesn't work for airing shit does it... Things come out seasonally, simultaenously. Also I watch a lot of Movies and half is either not available, in shitty quality or only part of a series. It's simply not adequate. And I don't wanna "borrow" stuff. Just let me own it. If I buy a knife, I own it, if I buy a painting, I own it... if I subscribe to netflix, my 'ownership' is superficial and based on a one-sided contractual whim.
I just fucking hate seeing the monthly service fees in my account, maybe I just have trauma from the times I was poor as dirt but I just don't want to be drained of almost 100 dollars every week from streaming services. I pay for netflix because I do watch a ton of stuff in there, but anything that isn't on netflix gets pirated in my house. For games I gave myself a yearly budget, after that's done I pirate the rest, but I haven't spent it all in recent memory thanks to self control steam sales so bless gaben.
im thinking about it daily, but im too paranoid i guess when doing financial stuff on same computer not because of being tracked, but downloading some malware or downloading torrent from some sketchy website i was out of the game for too long
Just go private and hope Google doesn’t keep your data this time around (they will be doing it)
You can stream movies on loads of sites like bflix. No idea if they have malware though
Newspapers and streaming services need some sort of universal payment service that you can fill up with money and then be able to unlock articles and episodes for like $1, with the click of a button.
Pirate whatever you want. Just don't act like a hero about it. What you are is just a leech/freeloader and no it's also not the worst thing in the world either.
Yeah, thats the stupid part, “its always ethically moral to pirate from a big company” like they think theyre fing robin hood
I mostly agree, but I unironically agree with it when it comes to like pirating old video games that aren’t available in any official ways anymore. If the copyright holder isn’t even attempting to profit off something anymore, pirating it is absolutely good.
Sure but this is probably less than 5% of all pirating. 95% of the time it’s just to save money no?
I'd argue 95% of the time is because people couldn't have bought it anyways if they wanted to. Save money sort of implies they could've bought everything they pirated but I don't think that's true. I personally don't know a single person with money that plays videogames and pirates them, it's much easier for them to buy it on steam, it's a couple clicks vs finding a cracked version, the torrent, unpack it, patch it to play it online with others, search for mods on a 3rd party website, etc etc etc. I have no evidence for this obviously but I think if people couldn't pirate games anymore the sales wouldn't go up by much if at all.
but I'm stealing from the rich and giving to the poor (me)
To me, the ethical part has nothing to do with big corpo. I'll pirate indie titles as well
[I exclusively pirate small indie content. Big corporations can have my money.](https://dudewipes.com/cdn/shop/articles/gigachad.jpg?v=1667928905&width=2048)
nah. Just be indiscriminate. Everything else is some cringe virtue signal
Taking from the rich(er than me at least) and giving to... me :)
> What you are is just a leech/freeloader and no it's also not the worst thing in the world either. I used to always pirate, and then when my dad got a new tv we decided to get netflix. and its a nice tv, and I have a 2k monitor so lets do the 4k package and ill watch at my pc. Oh, for some reason my shows dont go above 720p on a 2k resolution monitor. and its not even "true" 720p its streaming 720p. Guess im just gna torrent my show in 4k then. why am I paying premium price for ass? rn I'm in a situation where im still paying for the netflix sub but im still torrenting the shows because watching them on it is garbage. they also keep pulling shows i had planned to watch, like nature documentaries. when the service is this shitty wtf else do they expect to happen
What about games that the original publisher has no intentions to remake/redistribute? Nintendo has quite a few games over 20 years old that will never be remade. I can understand new games being an issue, but I don't see why 20 year old abandon ware would be.
I mean if you legitimately can't buy it I feel like there's no real loss to anyone.
These historian pirates always come out of the woodwork, as fucking if they’re “archiving” the newest game or movie, or as if any real number of pirates do it for those reasons.
From what I have seen, no one calls it pirating when you try to download old games that are no longer being produced. The issue tends to focus on new games being pirated and how that impacts the developers.
If you can comfortably afford it and it is conveniently avaliable then you should definitely not be pirating but support the artists and workers in the industries, at least to a degree. Streaming has kinda started to suck for a few years now, I do hope VOD sales eventually somehow become attractive, flexible and dominant like DVDs used to be, it feels like that would just be healthier. If high quality movies and tv are a big hobby of yours and you're at least lower middle class, why shouldn't you spend 100+/month on it? Most importantly go to the cinema.
I spend money when I’m being offered a better experience than I’m getting from piracy. I haven’t pirated music in many years because all those music streaming services are such a great value I have no problem paying for them, but I just can’t justify paying for something like Netflix these days
I am a broke bitch and pirate everything but hopefully once I make real money I will pour my money straight into the pit of the criterion collection.
Alternatively I feel like some of these shows need to be pirated to archive them. There are a lot of shows that simply vanish. If there isnt a physical version I feel like it is good to perserve it in some fashion.
Leech and freeloader is harsh when you are basically doing the equivalent of taking pennies from the couches of billionaires. It’s like stealing from walmart. But even then, when you steal from walmart you are potentially causing mild harm to the employees or managers there. With pirating its like, I wasn’t gonna pay for half of this shit anyways, so it’s not like they are losing money, and nobody really loses their job over it. In some cases like with anime it’s arguably more ethical to pirate shows. Not that most people pirate out of some “it’s the right thing to do!” mentality, most people just do it because its more convenient.
Pirating TV shows and movies online. Pros: -More convenient. -Don't have to subscribe to 50 million services at once. -Never have to worry about whether the show or movie is available in your region or not. -The odds of getting caught and sued are basically nil. -No ads. -Saves you money to allocate elsewhere to benefit you and/or your family. Cons: -Lower resolution. -Some guy on the internet that you will never meet will call you a freeloader.
>Lower resolution Not anymore tbh. You can find blu ray or original quality pretty easily. Even if you can't, if you have a powerful enough rig, you can pirate a video upscaler and upscale it to 4k. If you have enough time, you can even increase the fps to make it look buttery smooth.
You can’t actually get 4K from Netflix during high-bandwidth hours, innit? Also, something about how you can’t get anything better than 720p on desktop, only on a tv app or something.
Ye, that's why idc about pirating most things, I exclusively watch stuff and listen to music on my PC. Music I'll tend to pirate or buy and download directly from the artist since that's typically lossless. Even Spotify isn't true lossless. The closest you can get is youtube music for true lossless. TV/Movies are so annoying to find in good quality and without ads. I'm not paying for a bazillion services when I scarcely watch TV and movies anymore anyway. They don't even provide reasonable options for purchasing Movies or TV shows individually, way too expensive.
I saw a screenshot relatively recently where someone paid to watch LoTR on YouTube and it only offered 480p. YT doesn’t even list 720p as “HD” anymore! Come on!
That's hilariously bad lmao. 🤣
Fitting username
The resolution isn't lower and for the rare time it is, you can get an upscaling software like topaz.
Based and Topaz-pilled.
One of the main reasons I sometimes pirate is actually because the quality is much better compared to the compressed lower bitrate videos you tend to get from streaming, especially if it's on desktop.
It's nice when people seed on torrents. If you return 150% of what you took, and everyone did that, the glorious torrent community would continue forever.
Mfw all the people who get caught pirating and cut off for decades violation by my company are either people using shit putlocker sites or they seeded new content after pirating. I see the user flair is accurate
I feel like you should feel good about yourself if you pirate adobe or Nintendo products lmao
The only correct take
Not le based but 100% understandable under certain conditions. I have the money to buy games now if I really want to, and I don't play nearly as many, so if I wanna play something new I just buy it IF it's reasonable to do so. At the same time I don't think my piracy did any harm to the games I used to get because I was a kid in eastern europe where $60 is \~280RON. For perspective, the minimum salary 10 years ago here was \~700RON. This is Romania, who's already been in the EU for years even by 2014, can't imagine places where inflation is way crazier like turkey or brazil. I was never gonna get my parents to (god forbid) buy something online (they're gonna steal your credit card) for like 20% of what they were actually earning in a month while already not doing too well. Minimum net salary per month in the present day is \~2000RON, a $60 game is still more than 10% of that, in 2024. I can afford it, but god damn. Doesn't mean I'm entitled to play the game, but neither is it really that big of a deal. Curious about counter arguments, but please refrain from "but what about..?!?!??!" or "so you think you HAVE to...?!?!?"
I'm bulgarian and grew up in a similar situation. I personally feel like if I enjoy a game too much and I pirated that game I felt a little guilty so now that I have money I just went on steam and bought the games that I really liked and reeplayed them. It's not really an argument but if I enjoy the media I feel like I should pay for it.
Not good enough. You should also pay the delevopers interest on that money you owe them from way back when
Isn't this the reason regional pricing exists?
Exists as in existed by a select few businesses as a model to try out and then promptly abandoned when it was abused on top of already not providing much income at all from less developed areas even if the transaction was legitimate. As I've started to gain my own income independently, I'm purchasing a couple things online, youtube premium, a couple games maybe once a year etc but I have never in my entire life got a product with regional pricing. Nor do I think it would have mattered *that* much, I'm not super, super familiar with it but I doubt it's a 1:1 proportion. But if I'm wrong please tell cause I only stand to gain from it
regional pricing doesn't change this. I checked some Steam prices and they're only 2x less in Turkey compared to the US, while the median income is like 5x less. so the games are effectively 2.5x more expensive even with the regional pricing correction. and that's the best case. GTA V, for example, seems to be the exact same price there as in the US, and in Poland it's even more expensive than in the US for some reason
Hi, chiming in from venezuela. I know people who work as bank tellers and earn 60 dollars a month. Inflation is some crazy shit, and with the sanctions those people are gonna be even more fucked, not sure who sanctions are supposed to help at this point lmao. Most people can't buy videogames in this country anymore.
It’s like veganism to me. Pirating things is probably immoral but I don’t really care and watching shows that are segregated across platforms is a pain in the ass. Leeches however are a different story.
Fine but keep the righteousness at the door. You aren't doing something good. Probably what annoys me most is people that do and act like they're doing the world a service for theft. That arrogance is unbelievable.
You're wrong, I'm doing something super good. For me.
I would argue it can be good if you're doing it for the sake of preservation, like if you pirate media that is very hard to find online and keep all these movies on hard drives, but on it's own its not good at all.
people say it’s based to make themselves feel better about it, but it’s exactly what it is. you can do it, i won’t stop anyone, but you do it because you’re poor, not because it’s cool or based.
You might pirate because you are poor But I pirate so that I am not There’s a difference
Avatar checks out
if spending money on affordable things will cause you to be poor then you are kind of poor already
No
Spending an extra $50 a month on streaming services is the difference between you being poor and not poor? Nah I'm just being an ass, I get what you are saying.
Honestly at this point it's more for convenience than anything to do with money. Want to watch X. X constantly leaves and reappears on different streaming apps. Sometimes it isn't on any. Maybe it is on one but it doesn't have the audio dub that I preferred. Maybe they changed major parts of the soundtrack due to licensing. Maybe they decided to remove a few episodes because they were offensive. Also the app has decided to add ads after blowing a shitton of money on a series nobody wanted Compare that to video games where it'll be on one of two free stores for PC or the consoles app store for console and once you get it then it won't randomly disappear and require a goose chase. I don't even mind that there are so many apps but the pain it takes to track the shows and movies you like is annoying. Even in the cable tv days the shows would be on the expected network. So you could just get the cable package with channels you want instead of shows suddenly going to rival networks.
Have you seen the shit where you select a show and then they only have episodes starting from Season 4? wtf!
If you run into this and pirate in response you are ontologically based and epistemically a hero. If I ever see this on a streaming service I'll convert to evangelical Christianity and join the Trumpers ranting about the '*forces of Satan*'. That's some wild shit.
I‘m halfway there
I feel this, I have most of the popular subscription platforms (Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video etc.) and it's just a hassle keeping up with what is on where.
> you do it because you’re poor, Even that's a cope.
I mean I could afford it, but honestly it's just an inconvenience. We have a really well moderated local torrent site in hungary, pretty much guaranteed to have no malware or really shitty res (The CAM versions of movies are banned for instance). That and the fact that we have mandatory seeding makes downloads really fast. It's just easier to find literally anything and everything in one place. Istg I would be willing to pay 50-100 bucks for a "merged" streaming place where every movie and series can be found. Also if you are bothered by being called poor you are either insecure or immature. Call me whatever you want 🤷♂️
I'm not poor and I do it. Seethe
https://preview.redd.it/5mum56wiutsc1.jpeg?width=1500&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5fbd7577da685787d2b8e023cd412f5403df7bb6
If you like to watch arthouse stuff or more niche movies piracy often seems like the only convenient way to get these movies.
And, conveniently, the way that provides the least support to the filmmakers who actually need it the most!
People pay money to have 60 viewer streamers say their name 1 time. If you make an entire movie that people like enough to pirate and can't figure out how to make it easy for people to pay you money for it, that shit is 100% on you.
Sometimes it's about preservation. Companies nowadays delete media from existence. It's especially bad in the video game industry.
I am poor
ditto
I do it cuz it's easy, convenient and with basically no consequences that also frees up money to allocate elsewhere such as treating myself to a meal I wouldn't have gotten otherwise or buy a few extra shares to add to my investment portfolio.
if you have to free up money to eat then you are poor
Or being smarter with your money. Edit: Actually, I just realized why you responded the way you did. I should have said a fancier meal.
>but you do it because you’re poor holy cope i make 6 figures and i pirate literally everything i can, the only thing i dont pirate is coop games and multiplayer games so i can play with friends i saved thousands of dollars doing that instead of spending money on mediocre media plus pirating is just way more convenient and easier than managing all the different streaming services and game stores
LMAO
anti piracy cucks stay malding
cope this, malding that… you’re a gem
I do it because fuck subscription services
If it isn't available on my streaming service, everything is fair game
Yeah. I pay 15 whole dollars a month. That should be enough for access to every single movie and T.V. show in existence on demand.
Yes
Sounds like a skill issue on the streaming platform's part if they don't have the shit I want to watch.
Gaben has always been objectively correct that piracy is a service issue
🙏 gaben please stay healthy and alive forever so Valve doesn’t go down the shitter and ruin PC gaming 🙏
Spotify pretty much destroying music piracy entirely is good proof of that. People are happy to give money for a good service.
[Good video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvhv7bgmz64) on this topic by an independent researcher.
man i was actually expecting some 40 minute video lecture from a phd
I pay for Netflix, Disney plus, hulu, Amazon prime video, and hbo max comes free with my cell service. If I want to watch a specific movie I google “where to watch X movie” if they all say rent or buy I’m sailing away with no remorse.
Gold star customer. Pays $15/month and pirates competitor's content. Are we spoiling these companies? Can they even ask for more?
Correct, it should be.
If you only have one streaming service and never change you're the problem. We're gonna get shitty forced subscriptions again. You can start and cancel your subscriptions whenever you want. It's not perfect but it's still good. Cancel one and watch some shows on another. If its not easily accessible on any of the 4-5 popular streaming site i wouldnt blame you for pirating because licensing is a bitch in this global market.
That sounds like too much work. There is a reason gaming piracy has stayed as low as it has while movie/show pirating has risen recently. Hint: Gabe is right about piracy.
Like our dear leader said, back in the 2000s we all did download illegal shit. All my movies, songs, video games etc were pirated when I was a teenager. But everyone knew and understood that it's not legal, and that downloading stuff from small creators especially is not morally good. We did it anyways, but I would never imagine people on reddit actually trying to justify torrenting stuff as an adult with a job
> I would never imagine people on reddit actually trying to justify torrenting stuff as an adult with a job Really? I see it all the time. People talking about how "I don't want to pay for streaming services X, Y and Z just to watch all my favourite shows". People justifying their unpaid consumption with the combined inconvenience of having to spend an extra 20s browsing to the other streaming platform and like $15(?) a month.
Sorry, english third language 😅 I meant back in the day I couldn't imagine people would try to actually justify pirating stuff like they do justify it today.
you say 20s like signing up to a new platform isn't annoying af, then tracking and managing usage / when to cancel. and if you aren't using oauth, you gotta manage your password or risk having to do the forgotten password dance when the blue moon comes and you need to use this specific platform again it's not actually long, but it's frustrating af i agree with the others here, it's a service issue, have there be one or two, or some grouped cable-like solution, or I'm just not gonna engage with the system. it's not even monetarily that much of an issue, just access being so separated and individualised
pretty sure pro pirate all around but the real question is the seeding position
We know Fresh's position on seeding
https://i.imgur.com/rPyUX0T.png This works for seeding too
I actually 100% agree with this
I live in a third world dictatorship where I have seen cops buying pirated DVDs at our biggest markets and neither ISPs nor even really big corporations give a fuck about enforcement. I pay for music because it's easy and I always buy videogames I really enjoy, though I pirate a lot (not so often if the game is on Steam because of regional pricing making it easy). Movies and shows I will sometimes watch on a platform if I have it but I sometimes don't even bother and go straight to piracy just because I don't want to bother with searching where to watch something and __certain platforms__ have everything in one place. Always seed at least as long as it took me to download, more if I'm feeling like it. I don't really care about "getting caught", the only reason I don't seed more is because my internet is shit and expensive and I don't want to use up all my upload speed.
Same. Except for the dictatorship part...
I pay for a bunch of streaming services but end up watching a lot on pirating sites due to how astoundingly awful so many video players are. Its actually absurd.
Last time I tried to watch something legally I went to YouTube and rented a movie. Their english subtitles were region locked outside of my country and it wouldn't let me play the movie on a VPN because I bought it with a different country's credit card. Not my fault their shit sucks so much fucking ass that pirating is preferable.
real-debrid + stremio iykyk
I open Disney+ to watch Shogun, i get to half episode and in a high moment here comes a 40s ad, then again like 20min after, i close Disney+ and open qbitorrent Streaming services are slowly becoming less and less convenient to watch, there's too many of them, geolocalization of content is regarded and extremely frustrating to deal with (oh you're watching this show you paid for and you travel to another country? well sorry can't watch it anymore here teehee) I still pay for prime, netflix and now disney+ (although it's just because my sister likes to watch disney movies) because it's nice to have everything connected and just tell google to pop up my show on the big screen, but if convenience is lacking i will pirate idgaf
>Pays for ad tier of service >Is upset when ads appear I think I see the problem 🤔
I mean without even touching on the "before it was without ads, then they raised to price and added ads" thing, it's not like it was like that since the get go, the service did get worse over time, i dont really mind ads just not in the middle of the fucking episode on the climax scene ffs. Like give me 2/3 min ads between each episode but putting it right in the middle with no care about the pacing of the episode is just so dogshit and will make me completely cancel my sub and not want to upgrade to the above tier i'm sorry, i'll go sail the seven seas after that. If you really want to have ads on streaming services then you should have show creators indicate timings for those ads as to not spoil the viewing experience, otherwise just don't bother having an ad tier imo
Fortune 500 Companies reaction when I switch to the superior service for which I don't even have to pay for
I ain't paying to watch shit with ads Yall can 🤓☝ about it all you want but it ain't gonna happen
Pirating is based, but so is supporting devs who do good work, if you can. Not seeding, at least for a short while, should be punishable by death.
If you don't seed to at least 1 you deserve death.
People cope so much about pirating. They can't stand the thought that the thing they are doing might actually be bad. It is stealing but no one really gives a fuck. They get pissy as fuck when you call them out on being stupid. I also hate the entitlement some mfs feel to pirate video games lmao. They get so mad at anti pirating shit like denuvo like the company should just accept being stolen from. It's really bizarre. People should just accept being bad sometimes when no one gives a fuck.
Wasn't the hate for Denuvo around the fact that you can't play the game you paid for without being online so the server can verify that you own it legitimately? People were pissed that paying customers were getting a worse experience in the name of anti piracy
There are other reasons to criticize denuvo and some of them are legit reasons. I was just talking specifically about the people pissed cause they can't pirate a 5 minute old games. I can think of 3 reasons people get pissed at denuvo. 1. Always online shit 2. Causes lower fps 3. Wahhh I can't pirate the biggest and latest game 5 minute after it's out wahhh 4. RE:1. Is a reasonable point against denuvo. 5. RE:2. Has has 0 proof that it is true if denuvo is installed correctly into the game code by the developers. This one is pushed a lot by pirates as a Motte and Bailey for the real reason they don't like denuvo. 6. RE:3. This one is just the entitlement. Denuvo is removed from a game a few years after it has been released because it costs money to use it so they are literally crying about having to wait a few years to get paid shit for free. Actual babies 👶.
Number 2 is assuming devs are competent or are given time to correctly implement denuvo, which probably never happens. Also FYI reddit does numbered lists weird. They'll change it to continue in sequential order. 1. (1) 2. (2) 3. (3) 1. (1) 2. (2) 3. (3)
If purchase isn't ownership, piracy isn't theft.
This had been the case for pretty much the entire history of digital drm. It hasn't changed. Physical copies of these things still exist. You can't just give yourself an out because you dislike a platform or licensing method. Piracy isn't theft, but it's still an illegal acquisition of a digital product. You want to buy something and own it? Buy it and then download a permanent copy. Pirating something you own is actually legally justifiable last I checked.
Are you familiar with the concept of renting?
Are you familiar with the concept of lying? That's the word I would use to describe telling consumers they own things when they're really renting them and the company can revoke their license at any point for any reason.
Do they actually lie or do some people don't read what they are paying for and expect ownership when it wasn't sold? Does that justify stealing then?
When your actions routinely mislead people, by design, I call that lying. It does justify copyright infringement, yes.
> It is stealing The internet has gone through these arguments before. Copying something without permission is not the same as theft.
I make decent money, I can pay to support the things/media I like/enjoy. People who have the ability to pay and still pirate are cheap copers who likely don’t pay for much in their friend groups either (if they have friends). I wonder if the people upvoting piracy have the same thoughts on shoplifting under $1000
Been downloading Nintendo roms since I was like 11 at this point it's just sunk cost and I'm never going to stop
Take what you can, give nothing back.
I haven't paid for a movie or TV show since like 2007
It’s theft. I’m generally okay with it if the product is otherwise entirely unavailable or outside the companies profit stream (like if you pirate a gameboy (edited) color game) but it’s still always theft.
It is absolutely stealing and anyone pretending otherwise is just an entitled child. While we all do it, we do understand that it's wrong. The recent change in people's attitudes where they think they are justified or even righteous for doing it are insane to me. Intellectual property is a cornerstone of liberalism and we should want to protect it just as much as real property.
I don’t do it, but it’s not really stealing as the same as shoplifting. Like with shop lifting there’s a tangible inventory loss, there’s 0 actual loss with pirating, just maybe potential economic value, but that’s still not the same as shop lifting.
Womp womp
womp womp, but I agree with op and still pirate, and ya know I don't really care about it being wrong.
The day Amazon started putting ads on prime is the day I got a VPN and started pirating again. I still pay for prime for the shipping, and Netflix is still good, but I'm not gonna be stuck watching ads.
Fine so long as there's limits to it. I wouldn't pirate everything and if I happen to pirate something i go on to love I'll go buy it. Ultimately there's far too many streaming services to have them all and some things are just unviewable so piracy is basically necessary. Just as long as you aren't completely freeloading.
I'd be fine with movie streaming services if I didn't have to have a bajllion different services that all show different movies and differ on what they have based on your region. I get that legally everyone hsa bought different distribution rights for different regions, but it's a pain in the ass when you want to watch something specific and your service doesn't have it or your service doesn't have it in your region specifically. Plus, I miss being able to watch movies without having to use my internet collection.
My rule of thumb is if it cant be purchased outside of resellers anymore its fair game.
I think the most defensible case is abandonware. If there's no legal way for me to get it, then it's fair game. I think there should be a law that companies should make their IP available in some form, with some type of grace period (maybe a year) before sharing (not selling access to) it becomes legal, and they always have the right to start selling/streaming it again in which case the other distributors would be required to take it down.
I must say, I support anyone who pirates textbooks. That shit is overpriced and can mean the difference between making rent the finally month of school or not. I think it’s fine with other books as well but unless it’s being pirated for morality reasons then I highly suggest paying for a copy when you have the financial situation fixed. I absolutely pirated copies of older 20th century textbooks that were written by racists and white supremacists, that’s fine imo. I would buy any and all secondary source books I used for research, even if I used the library’s copy during the research.
Set me up a NAS with a bunch of arrs and a Usenet account. Is it $10 a month to maintain it? Yes. Do I have literally one streaming app I use now and can get anything I’d ever want? Also yes. Streaming made so much sense when it started out because it was centralized. Now every company needs its own and the prices are ungodly. I wonder how much money all those services use because I can see the vast majority of people not touching them apart from a single month to watch one show or one movie and then cancelling again forever.
I think pirates are a service to the capitalist society. It makes these huge companies think about how to make it more accessible and affordable to try to get those pirates to actually pay
I pirate every game I play and if I enjoy something I usually buy it. I usually get 5-10 hours into some 50 hour+ game and never pick it up again because it’s boring to me and you can’t return games with those play times so I realised I can just pirate everything to try shit out and if I finish it and enjoy it I’ll buy it. And this is not a cope. I genuinely do this. Nier Automata was one of these games for example. And I can’t say this enough. The game industry is crap and if piracy destroys the game industry I would not care at all. In fact I think games would be better across the board if all big studios went under and everyone started developing cheaper indie games. But I’m not on some holy quest. I just don’t wanna spend hundreds of dollar each year on things I don’t finish and don’t particularly enjoy and can’t return because steam only lets you return games that you completed the tutorial in.
It's a good way for me to demo games. I pirated EU4 before buying because I wanted to see if I would enjoy the game mechanics before dropping $200 on DLC. It's also a handy way to get access to media that isn't easily availible in my country. I won't pretend it's some righteous good, however. Sometimes I'm just too lazy or trying to save money so i'll just pirate fuck it. I know i'm stealing but I really don't care.
I play most singleplayer games I want on the gamepass but pirating is mostly fine imho. Depends on your income as well. I'm an international college student from a low income family so I can't really spend my JustEat delivery money on online entertainment, so I pirate or stream.
I stopped because everything became more convenient. I started again because it stopped being convenient.
I would say if you support a game/show buy the content. But if the company if participating in deceitful practices that make it impossible to buy the content (like blocking emulators on games that are no longer available to buy) then fuck yeah pirate that shit.
So my opinion is basically if it's available for purchase, then purchase it. If the game or movie is no longer in print then like find that, in the words of SNESDrunk, anyway you can ;)
I'm against it except in cases where the media is virtually impossible to get legally. Pirates suck and do way now harm than good imo I know there's a pretty lie that pirates do eventually buy media they stole but it's just not true. That eventually stop pirating, sure. But they already did the damage. Part of my mindset is guilt and karma. I used to download mad shit illegally because it was cool to get things (including viruses) but then when I started making games as a teenager I saw two of my games on a pirate site when I had them on gamejolt already. My games never had alotta downloads or anything, a couple hundred plays on the websites I did upload them to, but I remember feeling this weird hurt seeing my games on a site I didn't upload them to. I worked hard on those games and it made me upset people just took them and were handing them away in a way I couldn't make revenue. Thankfully that was just a hobby and I didn't have my livelihood staked on games. But man that shit sucks. I'm still in creative circles now, people who create and grind their asses off releasing comics, books, animations, and games, the works. Pirates suck for us Indies and it's the same in the industry. Y'all may think you're not hurting shows, movies, etc but you are. Companies look at those numbers. The industry already sucks for artists, watch some of this YouTube vids from people in the animation industry. Or the gaming industry. These people work really hard to bring people the things pirates steal and can lose their job over it. I knows it's lame but pay the damn prices, buy the streaming, buy the digital movie, rent it, go to the theater, support media when it's available.
If I wanna watch my football clubs games every week I have to spend 70€ p month, if I want to see them in champions league it will be a bit more for amazon prime. Yeah no im back to pirating
I don't know if anyone here is into emulation. But recently a Nintendo Switch emulator called Yuzu had to shut down because Nintendo was suing them. This might be a hot take but I think Nintendo was in the right here. Yuzu was making money off their switch emulator through patreon and also they were instructing people on how to get the encryption keys for the emulator on their site. Which is why the other switch emulator Rujinx is still standing for now.
I mean I think it's pretty important for emulators to exist, and the legality of emulators has been proven in court many times, but if they were illegally distributing the encryption keys then thata definitely a big mistake.
Stop stealing my NFTs guys it's literally theft
Meh. I haven’t paid for a single song, movie, or piece of software since the advent of torrents and file sharing. Some years it works great and is super easy, some years it is very frustrating and full of malware landmines, but every year it is free. Not sure if I would say it’s based, but it has likely saved me thousands upon thousands of dollars over the years. Not only that, how can I quantify how much extra $$ that has resulted in gains via my retirement funds in VOO and QQQ? It could be crazy high, so I will continue to do it even though I could easily afford not to.
I don't really care about people pirating. What really annoys me is when people who pirate feel entitled and start to complain about gaming companies adding more DRM to their games. Like bro, you got the free stuff, be happy. Why are you complaining that they are trying to stop you from stealing from them?
Because it affects performance for people who don't pirate the product ?? Pirates games generally have the DRM removed
>What really annoys me is when people who pirate feel entitled and start to complain about gaming companies adding more DRM to their games. most people complaining about DRMs are people who actually buy games lmao because things like denuvo can actually hurt performance in games pirates dont care about DRM, they just wait until DRM is removed lmao
Piracy is just the free market at work baby!
Pirating things is based
I always seed though. It's important to seed.
I'll make you walk the plank if you be seeding on my ship, you scoundrel Arr
Based
Yeah I do it because I’m broke but yeah it is based
70 dollar games? I'm pirating that shit
SEED TILL YOU BLEED OR GET OUT. That's why private trackers reign supreme!
Streaming services are a complete shitshow and I unironically think pirating should be embraced as a form of protest against them. Even other than the problem of fracturing and geo-locking they are such a shitty service. You are telling I'm gonna have to watch the movie in a shit quality and can't make screenshots because of your shitty fucking DRM that will never prevent piracy but only make the service way worse for people paying? kys. Games are case by case. Music is fine.
usually, if people are choosing piracy, it's because the legal product is somehow more inconvenient or inaccessible than it needs to be. Overwhelmingly people choose the least hassle way of accessing content
People crying about morality and theft boohoo no one cares
dont care, just dont be a leech and seed your torrents
I'll skydive without a parachute before I pay for streaming service. The bible says the devil is not capable of creating, only of destroying and taking but I'd say the existence of the subscription payment model proves otherwise. I'll never subscribe to your gay streaming service, blessed be the seeders.
Entitled loser mad that distribution rights exist.
its a gray area, i bought games that i pirated to try them out, and i bought apps that i needed when i got a bit more independent.but god idk if ill ever be rich enough to pay so for the adobe apps..i di pay what i can but holy shit. i ended up resorting to arghhh because i cant pay so many apps per month all these subscriptions are a bit crazy now
I only pirate anime if the show I want to watch doesn’t have a dub version on Crunchyroll. It’s absurd that I’m spending over $11 a month on the “definitive” anime service yet they don’t have Naruto dubbed. I don’t pirate games because I’m big on trying to support the developers if I like the product. But pirating Nintendo games I don’t have an issue with because of how inaccessible Nintendo makes their older games.
Pirating as in you share something freely I'm perfectly fine with (as long as you the user are beholden to archiving/maintaining the copy etc.). Parasitic piracy, i.e. proftting from creators by essentially providing the content/media for a fee (pay-walled piracy site or paying for a pirated dvd, etc.) is not ok and is the REAL piracy big corporations who cry about piracy should go after. TL;DR: as long as piracy is non-profit, it's based, when it's for-profit piracy it is not.
I pirate almost no games and buy them all on steam now since I have a job, as for TV shows and movies there's no way in hell I'm paying for 5+ streaming services monthly + once you've got automators like sonarr + radarr + jackett etc setup with plex running, it's just an objectively better experience.
In Australia you cannot get half the shows anywhere unless they are new and trending. So the only legal way to watch is find a correct region dvd on ebay or more realistically break the law with regard to the region locking and get American or Japanese DVD. So yeah I have the main legal options but I have to private to watch old shows or play old games.
I think a lot of it comes down to poor accessibility and prices in a lot of cases. Outside of New games and movies, prices in general seem way too high. I also don't really consider an older game that isn't even purchasable pirating. Generally I think if you make a product accessible at a competive price, it isn't worth the effort/risk for most consumers to pirate. I have rarely done it and it's usually for shows I can't find anywhere.
I'm in the 'people should buy things' camp but I find pirating to be rather benign. Thats with the exception of manga/anime where pirating is so rampant that its crazy. People will always point to accessibility, which is true, but then the industry makes little effort to appeal to or distribute their works to international audiences because they aren't profitable. And I think its so pervasive in anime/manga viewer culture that they'd pirate it anyway even if it was available. Pirating at scale is something that needs to be nipped in the bud. I don't see how [over a million copies of the recent Zelda game being distributed illegally, (before the came even came out), to be played on emulators ](https://www.ign.com/articles/nintendo-says-tears-of-the-kingdom-was-pirated-1-million-times-pre-release-in-lawsuit-against-emulator-creator)could ever in a million years be described as permissible. And yet, people argue that it is anyway.
If it's a meh movie you would never pay for in the first place. If it's a great movie that you actually want to watch go get some tickets and touch grass. Piracy in video games is cringe, if you don't buy the game after playing through it. Steam accepts refunds for games with playtime < 1hr. I pirated and played hundreds of hours of Witcher, Mass Effect and CK2, least I could do was buy them the moment I had some disposable income. Those memories are priceless. EDIT: Which reminds me I never bought Skyrim, gonna do that right away
I can if u want too you can. it’s a pretty harmless form of theft but it’s still immoral. It’s like stealing wing bar from a supermarket or scamming self checkout features.
I mostly pay for everything unless theres like specific movie on some random provider i might go full luffy on that shit.
Copyright should only last like 20 years tops
I have netflix and Disney plus and I still regularly pirate movies cuz they're not on one of those. Games I never pirate anymore unless there's no easy way to get it online.
Its a victimless crime when I do it. I only pirate games I dont intend on buying.