Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

For me anything Nintendo is fair game, I also dont bat an eye at any movie or show piracy.

A lot of folk bring up (correctly, imo) indie creators and end up mentioning Stardew Valley as an example - especially within the first couple years of its release. SV as an example has fell off, as it's had it's years to rake in cash.

But I absolutely pirated SV for YEARS, multiple times. I was in a place where I was utterly broke, could not always afford food, and only had internet because of assistance programs. My laptop couldn't run much, not even minecraft at that point. It could, however, run Stardew Valley. So I re-downloaded it multiple times over the handful of hand-me-down hard drives that I used in a laptop that kept frying hard drives. (eyeroll)

I did eventually get to a place financially where I could afford to buy SV, so I did. Then it went on sale on console so I bought it again, knowing I'd never play it (console without the aiming mod is awful), but it helped pay it back how much play time I'd enjoyed back when I couldn't afford the game.

That, to me, is ethical.

For me, I mostly rationalize my piracy as something generally unethical that I choose to partake in anyways. People often cite piracy as an issue with the service being provided, but there's just a lot of instances where I'd rather pirate something than pay for it, not because the service is bad, but because "Why pay for something when I can just get it free, eh?"

Though I think there is one specific case where I'd undoubtedly consider piracy ethical, which is for products that are not being sold on the market currently. Take a retro video game for instance. If it isn't being sold by any company, then there is no way to legally play the game apart from getting a secondhand copy. Either way, the company that owns the rights to it won't derive profit, and they aren't involved in secondhand markets whatsoever, so pirating the game effectively results in 0 negative consequences for any party, compared to legally acquiring it.

If the copyright holder no longer provides a legal way to acquire any piece of media directly from them, making it so that the only way to acquire it legally is in a manner that prevents the copyright holder from seeing any profit, and the legal option is essentially a grift where you’re sometimes paying 100x the sticker value for something where the copyright holder won’t see a single cent…

All piracy is ethical since all information should be free.

I purchased Zelda BotW when it was 6ish months old. Didn't like it, didn't finish it.

I'm working on getting it now on the steam deck because it's critically acclaimed and I'd like to understand what other people like so much about it. It's also my young nephew's favorite game. Totally legal emulation if I were actually dumping my own firmware.

When I pirate Tears of the Kingdom afterward, I'll have several different reasons;

The switch is underpowered. I'm done buying games for a device that can't keep up with modern game development. I'm not some performance purist either, I'd just like 60 frames at 1080. Zelda still looks good at that res. Also the hardware just kinda sucks. The joycon issues remain unaddressed and and the facebutton mapping should at least be mappable on a system level if they insist on being backwards.

Nintendo has pathetic online gameplay support, and a history now of gutting their digital stores. If I'm going to lose access to my switch purchases in the same time frame that the cartridges give out, I'm not paying. The walled garden they've created as a children's toy company doesn't serve me at 30.

If they'd throw these games on steam or epic with some industry-standard sales on occasion I'd just buy them outright.

If nintendo sold a box closer to a PS4/5 in power I could call my emulation unethical, but they don't. Their game runs better as an illegitimate product and that's on them.

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 believe online piracy is the uploading part, not the downloading. I think uploading has a much more narrow use case, but if everyone stopped we wouldn't be able to download.

I stopped going to cinema when the Hollywood movie cartel started messing with freedom on the internet, and I don't feel any remorse pirating Hollywood movies.

When I started earning enough to have disposable income, I made sure to buy ebooks and audiobooks, as well as supporting my favourite musicians on Bandcamp or by buying merch.

i have downloaded tens of thousands of dollars of audio recording software. i always told myself that, if i were to ever make money from my efforts and usage thereof, i would be happy to pay the author.

i never made any money. but i hope the right people got paid by those that did.

Whenever EA or Ubisoft releases a half assed game with stellar marketing

Pirating content with the intent to buy it after trying it out using the pirated version (e.G indie games)

Hoo boy, opening up a can of worms with this. I'll give the "hot take" here and don't bother replying because I'm not going to be drawn into (another) debate. Feel free to downvote away.

I think most piracy is unethical but it depends on exactly what you're pirating.

The top comment here is about scientific papers. I think that's also totally unethical unless the research is publicly funded. You are not entitled to that information. It usually requires a large amount of funding and wouldn't be possible without it.

I think piracy is okay for items that are otherwise unavailable for purchase, or put behind arbitrary hardware limitations (looking at you Nintendo).

Also I pirate from YouTube (ad blockers) because Google is an incredibly unethical company and the official app is abhorrent and even if you pay for Premium the "official" method of watching videos (YT app) is abhorrent and does not respect any of your input on what you actually want to see. There are unofficial apps made by nerds in their Mom's basement that are 10x better at showing you that, while also respecting your privacy and not logging your activity for use in profiling you and showing ads, so that's what I use. I budget $30/mo to donate directly to my favorite creators on other platforms.

Everyone wants us to subscribe. This a.m. I listened to some guy on the internet rant about HP shutting down his printer remotely b/c he'd bought a subscription, when he bought the printer (didn't read fine print in contract/TOS--that's another rant), to a certain number of pages/month. His credit card number changed, HP didn't get their tithe, so they remotely disabled his printer. Entertainment moguls suck up all the money in that industry, leaving little for artists--to wit, the strikes--and streaming subscriptions are expensive. Cable prices are ridiculous. Corporate greed and having every subscriber subsidize sports channels probably account for that. Everything costs too much, and my budget is small. Original Star Trek and original Doctor Who were broadcast over the air. In exchange for commercials, we got to watch for free. If I could subscribe to iplayer, that would satisfy my needs. Alas, I don't live in UK, and BBC's arrangements with multinational entertainment corps preclude my subscription. So I pay for a good VPN. That's still more than it used to cost to watch. Tropicana OJ used to have a commercial showing people sticking straws right into an orange to suck its juice. I often feel like the orange. Piracy is ethical.

everything and nothing