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Critical support for the Lemmy world peeps in their fight against pro-intellectual property nerds
(hexbear.net)
this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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I buy most of my content, steam mostly for games, have spotify, buy music from bandcamp for DJ sets, at least my favorites, have family netflix, HBO, disney +, although I don't use those as much since they are mostly full of crap. Sometimes I even buy/rent a movie if it is not available in those and I can't find any torrent, or just out of convenience. I produce music and buy all my audio software (ableton and fuckton of plugins) because I don't want to deal with the hassle of using pirated versions. I buy ebooks every now and then too, although with that I also admittely pirate some, especially when the author is dead, in which case I really don't feel any guilt for pirating it. I also use patreon often and support creators that way.
I still think piracy needs to be an option, so streaming services can't have their way and we are just forced to use their enshittified platforms. I avoid it, because I understand not everything can be open source, and nothing get's done without revenue. I don't pirate from small authors/creators.
All the while musicians get basically fucking nothing from huge streaming services profiting from their labor. Series get cancelled left and right despite good reception because they were not profitable enough, although still profitable, because netflix is only interested making next big hit. Games are filled with microtransactions and kernel level tracking (anti cheat), forced online features in single player game and sometimes games one bought are just made unavailable, like with old mobile games (case in point, dead space mobile). Professional software is often moved to predatory subscription models and paywalled updates to the software, like Avid, Waves.
And people still cirlejerk about piracy being the worst thing to intellectual property ever. Problem isn't piracy, problem is small creators are payed so little from listens/views/whatever that the can barely get by, and have to make alternate source of income via patreon or some other stuff. Piracy won't even make a dent in that.
Luckily in every category some people/companies are pushing back but all of this is just case in point why we need piracy. When I get around releasing music/games, I don't mind piracy at all, might even put my own tunes on pirate sites out of spite. Current intellectual property laws are fucking joke and only benefit the largest creators in their respective fields.
After Adobe fucking me out of thousands, I swore I'd make sure I never gave them another cent. if there weren't greedy scumbags I would've paid for upgrades (hundreds of bucks) to the master collection every 5-10 years. Now, because that wasn't enough for them, they'll never EVER get another dime from me. I encourage pirating their shit because fuck them. What they did to their customers was unconscionable. When I called to ask them to make this right, after essentially breaking their promise to me that this enormous purchase was an investment, their best offer? 25% of my first year of cloud. Lol... Would've still felt like the shaft of they gave it to me free for 5 years.
You can summarize that in just simply saying: capitalism is the problem. Just with anything else, capitalism doesn't care to give us the best entertainment, it simply will benefit the ones with the most profit. So long we live under capitalism, this will be the underlying problem. Capitalism doesn't care about what people want or need.
Same. I make good money today and I can pay for the stuff I use, but when I get some nostalgia and feel like playing a game from my childhood like The Little Samson, my only option is to go cry on a corner because the game isn't available anywhere and is worth 3 thousand dollars minimum - which even if I paid would never go to the folks who made the game anyway.
When I was a teenager I couldn't afford anything. I didn't even had a computer or a video-game of my own, I started working at a Lan house when I was 14 just to be able to afford an occasional snack. I played a bunch of SNES games at that time thanks to emulators - if piracy wasn't an option I would never have played them and probably wouldn't have gotten into videogames that much. 6 years later I managed to buy a DS and a couple games. Since then I've bought several consoles and a ton of games for each of them. Nintendo made several thousand dollars from me over the years and that would never have happened if I didn't have access to SNES pirated games 20 years ago.
I even got to make a game of my own now, which directly benefitted from piracy as well, as I noticed a bunch of people playing pirated versions on YouTube, with comments on those videos mentioning they liked it and bought it. My main concern related to piracy at that time was that those players were not getting bug fixes and new stuff I added to the game.
In truth, there is no downside to piracy - it's a net gain for everyone involved as long as the paying customers get to have a better, more comfortable experience with not having to deal with any hassle to consume your content. But if you make it harder for me to consume your content than the high seas does, well that's on you.
Amine