If you want to get your favourite Linux distro anonymously, then you can torrent it via i2p.
this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2025
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piracy is ethical with only small exceptions like when the content is produced by a low income author/artist
I think actual artists get virtually nothing from streaming services. If you find art that you do like, considering directly supporting the artists. For example, go to a musical artists live show or buy merch from their website. I’m sure their are better ideas out there.
Piracy isn't stealing because you don't take the original away from the creator, you just create a copy which doesn't detract at all from the original copy. In fact, copyright is more a tool for stealing than piracy, as large corporations will get small creators to sign over the rights to the content they created, consolidating 'ownership' rights in the hands of a bunch of greedy corporations (Disney, Microsoft, etc) rather than the people that actually created them.
To add (kinda what you said but from slightly different angle)
Intellectual property is a crime.
Just think about it, just because someone was first to fill the paper work for an idea means you have to ask their permission to express any similar idea you had yourself.
If you want to support creators there are other ways which are often more direct without middle men taking a cut.
I bet you wouldn’t be happy if something you made and that you’re trying to sell get copied and shared completely for free. Many people would use that without giving you a penny. It is not stealing in a stricter sense, but it would hurt your finances for sure.
I'm not a large company. As long as I'm credited appropriately I would be fine and hoping this newfound attention brings more customers to me to offset any "losses" from people who would have paid had they not pirated it.
As a real-life example, did you know that papers available on Sci-Hub receive statistically significantly more citations than those unavailable there? source
I wouldn't try to sell information. Physical products, services, support, sure. But you can't sell information which has no scarcity. Maybe you could pay for someone to create something they otherwise wouldn't have, but not for something that already exists.
To play devil's advocate, would you be happy if you spent a long time writing a novel and as soon as you published it a company copied all the text and started printing cheap copies, or just releasing free ebooks of it? As far as I'm aware that's what IP law is "supposed" to protect against.
If I wrote a book, I would release free epub files myself.
Don't forget that the EU Commission funded a report to document the impact of file sharing and then buried it when they found out that it was actually beneficial to the creators. So if you want to engage in file sharing, you're actually helping them.
Do what you will with that information. If you really want to boycott, then boycott the content altogether. If you can't hold back, then download them, but you're helping them out anyway by doing that.
The best thing you can do is support your local art scene and find better alternatives.
The last line of the post is in accord with what you said
Right, but I don't think it's explicitly clear - today, the US is dominant in movies for example. Supporting alternative industries could start to chip away at that dominance, and if a day comes when nobody outside the USA cares about their movies anymore because they have their own industries, that would do a lot more damage.
I think we're in agreement, but I just want to point it out in case anyone missed that point. By promoting alternatives, getting to the point where nobody cares about US media anymore is really the ultimate goal if you're trying to do maximum damage.
(And to be honest, American movies are really not that good. They're very formulaic and predictable. That's why I wouldn't bother watching them, even if I wanted to download them for free.)
Honestly, framing the whole thing as "disrespecting hard work and effort" sounds suspiciously like American anarchocapitalist nonsense.
Me watching or buying stuff is not a relationship and does not express support, respect or anything other than a commercial transaction. When I want to express support I express support (primarily by voting) and when I express disapproval I express disapproval (primarily by voting for people who will properly regulate your whole deal into submission).
I don't express myself with money, I express myself with political action, thank you very much.
Look up how much money a band will make per stream from Spotify:
Spotify pays artists between $0.003 - $0.005 per stream on average. That works out as an approx revenue split of 70/30 - so that’s 70% to the artist/rights holders and 30% to Spotify. REMEMBER: The rights holders of a song can include; the publisher, songwriter and the master recording owners (i.e. the artist and/or label if they’re signed to one).
So if you listen to your favorite album with 10 tracks, the payout will earn $0.03- $0.05 and the artist has to split that, too. If you really like the album and listen to it 100 times, that will be $3-$5. So maybe go to a concert or buy a vinyl record and everybody will be better of. The impact of you pirating an album and listening to it 10 times is null
Listening to a track 10x means Spotify says it's worth max $0.05, $0.035 goes to not-Spotify, and a fraction again of that goes to the actual artists rather than the publishers...
So either millions of people listen to a track dozens of times or it's not really worth being on Spotify except for the reachability, right?
Remind me how much of spotifys subscribers money went to antivax podcasts?
No clue, I hope similarly low or lower.
I'm afraid I'm wrong, though.
Starting?
Not at all related, where can you find cheap hard drives in europe?
Your local computer shop, most likely. If it's run by some old guy with a soldering shop hosting his website on his own little server in the back room of the shop they're probably the best, speaking from experience here (NL)
As for the Netherlands, ~~tweakers .com~~ tweakers.net their price watch has a decent database of competing prizes across Dutch web shops, even smaller ones!
To anyone reading this, please let me know if there's websites like this for other European countries!
Thanks, but I don't have any shops lkke that nearby. The link tweakers.com doesn't seem to work.
Edited, it's supposed to be tweakers.net
I usually reach their website using DuckDuckGo's !tweakers bang like so: Demo link
This is something that I wrestle with. There are certain companies I don’t want to spend money with, but I want to support the work and the crews who work on those things.
The argument is my money doesn’t go to the crews. But my time spent watching adds to the metrics that gets these shows and albums greenlit, but ultimately it comes down to how you feel about those quandaries.
I make games for a living so I feel that supporting is best for me. If no one bought the games I worked on I couldn’t feed my son. Instead I’m making more conscious decisions about where and how I spend my money. I just switched to Proton for my email, I use Kagi for search. I support teams I care about and support services I believe in. I buy games I want to play. I don’t think too much about the other things.
If a show is not available in my country easily, I do pirate. That’s kinda the only thing I pirate these days.
That's ironic, considering many people have recently been moving away from Proton due to the CEO's support for Trump
Hadn't seen the tweet. I was using Hey but those founders have also been problematic apparenty, and the service is just expensive, not as secure as what Proton offers, and I thought I could consolidate a number of services and accounts and save some money...
I have started subscribing to services in Europe now. They have different content, but that is fine. I want Europe to have more TV shows and movies. The American ones I'll probably just pirate if I really really want to watch it. We'll see.
I am not a huge fan of IP and copyright in the first place, I see that it has a value, but don't like how long it lasts. There should be a reasonable time of 10-15 years or something, but not more in my opinion.
The legality is not an argument that works for me. The only thing that matters is ethics / morality.
At the moment I don't want to support American business, and that is more important to me. I have been a paying subscriber to several services for a long time, but no more.
I guess the question is if they have lost a "sale" / "subscriber" that they would have gotten if I did not have the opportunity to pirate.
I don't think they have, I would not want to pay if I had no other option either.
Always has been.