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.
I wanted to watch the Clarkson-Hammond-May “Top Gear”. Only on BBC iPlayer. Only in the UK.
The roundabout 22 series’ and specials simply do not exist outside of that. What are you supposed to do? I would have paid the BBC, but they even discourage the use of VPN’s themselves.
Most people here arguing that the “ethical side” of piracy is when the media is not available elsewhere. Or if it’s available but at an abusive price/requirements. To which I agree.
But I also believe that culture shouldn’t be only for those who can afford it. Books, movies, videogames, tvshows, education, science is what makes a society culturally rich. This is exactly why we have libraries. It’s a public service. I’ve seen teens become avid consumers and incredibly knowledgeable in certain subjects, to the point that they are making a living because of it. Because the internet allow them to explore and grow. Without a pricetag nor preassure on their families.
Heck! Even I pirated almost everything in my teen years. Nowdays I pay for a lot of media. Don’t get me wrong, we should be supporting artists. Always. If possible.
If it’s not possible, go ahead just pirate it. Piracy it’s just the best digital library in history. With a heavy euphemism attached: “piracy” (the act of attacking ships in order to sack them, kill people, rape people). It has a bad connotation on purpose. Don’t fall for it.
Edit: punctuation
I like this take a lot. Noone should be kept from educating themselves due to their financial means or lack thereof, especially since a lot of e.g. research is financed through money from the state i.e. money that belongs to the public.
Media not available for purchase in any format. Final Space for example, it got pulled from Netflix and there’s no physical copies at all. The only way to watch it is to pirate it.
That seems to be a regional thing, it’s still available in Germany on Netflix.
Calling it ethical is a higher bar than calling it ethically acceptable. Ethically acceptable is a higher bar than practically acceptable.
If you are factually incapable of getting it otherwise, it is ethically acceptable. If, at the same time, you need the material, it is ethical.
Without the need and unavailability or unavailability, I would always be careful about calling it ethical - I would not call it ethical.
In those cases it is at least subjective and a weighing of various morals, costs, need or desire, and practicality. (By pirating you are a beneficiary without supporting the thing - which one should at least be aware of and weigh.)
- Content that you cannot acquire by any “lawful” means.
- Content that you already own a copy of (Yes, this includes “only” having a “license” to it; you own what you own).
- Content that is outrageously priced, and/or from large companies where the people who worked on the product will receive nothing from sold copies. (EA, Activision, Ubisoft, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, etc)
Third category also contains works so old that only the people hoarding rights to said works profit from giving out licenses to them bc they never worked on them.
I believe it to be ethical, when publishers pay the actual creator’s penny’s for their work, not because they can’t afford it but because of greed.
I can’t really trust that a game is worth the price tag anymore. So I treat piracy as a extended demo. If I feel the fun to price ratio is solid I’ll buy the game.
I think the system of Steam letting you try out a game for 2 hours/2 weeks is pretty fair. You can return it without further reasons.
Two hours isn’t enough for most games, at least for me. I couldn’t count how many games I’ve plunderer and never touched again after a few hours.
I get you, there are some games where you can barely pass through the tutorial in 2 hours, other games are super complex let’s say Paradox strategy games. On the other hand, 2 hours is much more than nothing. And it’s hard to balance, think of some indie games where 2 hrs is like 25% of the game, it can be abused easily.
The system is especially useful for shitty games that were hyped but get released as unstable alpha or old games that just won’t run on your system for whatever reason. I know, a lot of publishers are pure evil with their release and DLC policies and I can understand people develop anger towards the whole industry. But all in all I think it’s a nice-have.
IMHO whenever you actively need something and the owner either doesn’t make it available or the price is prohibitively expensive, it’s justified. That especially includes papers, books and other tuition material that’s been paywalled or made expensive as hell without any actual reason, even more so if the author gets next to no compensation.
Downloading series and movies that aren’t being streamed anymore, by all means.
When it comes to current movies, it depends on what’s available. Unfortunately most streaming platforms don’t have Chinese subtitles, and my wife often struggles to fully follow the original audio and the English subs often disappear too quickly.
For software, my personal stance is that if you use something every once in a while, pirate away. If you use it regularly and/or generate income from it, then pay your dues.
Any streaming content that gets pulled from a service and isn’t available elsewhere.
Add to that, any streaming content that is not available in the original language. Here in Germany, a lot of older movies are only available to stream with the terrible German dub. I’m not paying for that so I’m not paying at all.
