Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Dude, check your assumptions. I haven't pirated anything in at least a decade. I'm just an IT guy that signed up for Lemmy and puruses the 'all' page.

I do think there's an excellent case for the moral application of piracy in many situations.

Large corporations often acquire their catalog of legally protected ideas through the systemic exploitation of people. If the people who did the work have been paid every cent they'll ever get for their work, and the work itself has recouped the cost to make it, then I see no moral imperative for the work to make another dime of revenue. Obviously that's not a black and white issue and obviously piracy often does hurt smaller creators, so care and reason are called for here.

On the flip side sharing is core part of the basic human experience and there's a great argument to be made that with the advent of computers (which have both reduced the technical barriers to access tools to create, and have expanded the possibilities of what can be created), copyright law is too restrictive and is actually impedes the creation of new art, running against the fundamental point of copyright in the first place. Since the average person does not have Disney money for lawyers and lobbyists piracy often seems like the sensible way to for the common person to push back.

I also think that piracy can hurt people who absolutely do not deserve it. But I'm not going to pretend a complex societal issue is as simple 'law good, law breakers bad'.