Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Suppose some dude on the street hands out books for free and gives you a copy. Does it make you unethical for accepting one? Would it be different online?

Suppose your government charges a "blank media tax" on storage devices to "compensate" creators with the assumption you already "illegally" download their content, didn't you already pay for it anyway?

What if you're downloading stuff as a hobby but you'd never pay for it if that would be the only other option, did anyone lose anything of value?

I look at it this way: A company's goal is to generate revenue from some product's sale. So, I could ask myself two questions regarding digital items:

Am I making money from the piracy of that product? Is this product something I would have otherwise purchased?

As I'm not making money from it and they are not being deprived revenue as I would not have bought it anyway, my actions are therefore ethical.

Everything on a streaming service that attempts to limit password sharing. They made traveling with a streaming stick a completely unnecessary faff. Everytime I go to use a service they make me reverify the device multiple times a day. So, fuck you asshole now I'll stream your content for other sites and stop paying you!

Any Nintendo game.

For me I have rules I set for myself when pirating, and generally try to reserve it for if it's something I'm unlikely to see or get otherwise (like how stuff is exclusive to a million different streaming services now, or older games that don't have an official re-release) or there's ethical reasons I don't want to support it (Like some EA stuff and Adobe, though so far the only [arguably] accessible PC games I've pirated are the Sims 3 and 4)

If it's indie stuff and [non-text]books I try to avoid it if possible.

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.

If you couldn't afford to pay for it in the first place, then they're not losing any money.

I don't know about "ethical" but justified yeah.

Certainly if media is not available for purchase I have no problem with people pirating it. But also if it's not available in a reasonably accessible format. For example, I wanted to show my son the original TMNT show. I would have happily bought it on Vudu, Amazon or Play Movies, but it's only available on iTunes. I have all Android devices and don't even have a personal Windows device, so I would need to jump through serious hoops to get it working if I bought it.

IMO pirating media from anybody but indies is moral, correct, and good. The big companies have trade representation and lobbyists which they use to push their insane copyright agenda. Consider the Mickey Mouse act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonny_Bono_Copyright_Term_Extension_Act which extends copyright to such an absurd term, only corporate lawyers could have devised it. Which they did. Disney is a great example, in fact, since much of their media empire relies on adaptations of public domain works which are then copyrighted basically indefinitely. If our copyright laws today were more similar to what copyright laws were back then, we could have a lot more remixes, adaptations, and takes on well known stories and media.

Anyway, by purchasing from these copyright pushing companies I am funding their agenda, which is against sensible patent law and copyright law, and against me. They also promote vile DRM schemes, as their industry pushes ever onward away from personal ownership of anything and toward rent seeking behavior. If it were up to them we would all have tivoized boxes that we not only have to pay rents for, but must also consume ads on. Literally against my own interests to give them money, ever.

It's too bad that so much of our media is produced by a shrinking number of companies, because pirating their shit isn't even worthwhile. Most of their garbage is unwatchable slop.

As for any other form of piracy, I consider intellectual property to be mostly bullshit. But I can appreciate the time that goes into creating a work one wishes to sell and having some domain over that for a period of time after initial publication. But like many other things about our world, it's the stupidest version we have to live with.

P.S. and that's just one aspect of copyright law. Imagine trying to copyright the fundamental advances of human knowledge and science. God bless Sci-Hub!

I'd say as long as it isn't harming a small independent artist, then its generally ethical.

I expect to pay a fair price for things. Unfair pricing are profits made from monopolies which are illegal. Copyrights exist to enforce monopolies, and thus are unethical in my view. It is especially evil when lobbying pushes laws that develop mass surveillance, private militia and automatic justice. While these laws exist, piracy is an act of resistance against oppression.

And it must be mentioned : science should be free. Especially medical science.

What pisses me off with copyrights is that the unethical or outright evil behaviour come from the copyright owners, but they turned the laws so the evil behaviour is legal and we now have these questions about the ethic of so called piracy.

I'm not sure I can think of any examples of unethical piracy, except maybe bootlegging for sale as mentioned elsewhere.

I don't believe that piracy hurts anyone, so I can't understand any arguments that it's unethical.

Perfectly ethical:

• Content that is Inaccessible legally such as old games, abandonware, delisted media, banned stuff etc.

• Digital copies of physical content you own

• Digital Content that you already own such as ebooks or movies, but are restricted access due to DRM or single-copy rules or other dumb stuff. If I paid for something I should have the right to access it however I want (as long as I don't distribute it)

Gray Area:

• Pirating work that benefits a publisher but not the creator. Movies, Shows, and Songs released by studios that exploited the creators of that material and not giving them a cent. This includes scientific work and research.

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.

When I don't want to give money to a specific company that I dislike. EA is an example.

It's only ethical if you need the thing you're pirating, which doesn't apply to much. Pirate of you want, but look for ethics elsewhere.

When you have zero money

Paying for the product after viewing/using it if you like it or it's good.

Considering I'm pretty pisspoor at the moment everything is. And tbh if I had money I still wouldn't pay for movies but I would buy a lot on bandcamp(so I can make torrents out of it)

Software wise, anything without a demo. The support from companies is dire at the best of times and if something doesn’t work on your system your screwed. In shops you can test the suitability of something by testing it (sitting on a couch, laying on a bed) but with software they take your money and run.

Also anything abandoned is fair game.

I genuinely believe that stealing is stealing and anyone justifying it is doing so to not feel guilty about it.

I download things I haven't paid for. It's wrong. I can rationalize this because the stuff I'm stealing has already made their money and me enjoying it on my own time likely has zero impact on the content creators. Also, fuck the non-skippable intros and commercials on blurays.

The one exception to this, what I would argue is unquestionably "ethical piracy", is content that's actually important to the progress of humanity. Things like well researched scientific papers, studies about the humanities, psychology, the affects of technology, mechanization, artificial intelligence, etc. This should never be held behind lock and key. You whining about not having access to How I Met Your Mother is not a valid reason to steal content.

Also, people need to spend more time at their public libraries. If you want free shit, a lot of it is there explicitly for the purpose you all espouse.

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.)

All piracy

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…

As long as you're not reselling or appropriating others' creations as your own, everything 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.

When you are a student and cannot obtain a reasonably priced copy of software- as a company I would see this as a sure fire way to onboard a new generation into my product which will then be paid for with company money later on.

The one time I felt truly justified is when I bought quite a few vita games digitally and Sony took me not signing in for a few months as an excuse to wipe my account. They did email but I didn't see it until the account was gone.

So yeah hacked my Vita and downloaded everything I had owned and more.

If I’ve paid for it once, but the Powers That Be make it unavailable or want to charge again to continue using it, I have no problem with finding a copy that works to make my purchase whole.

Anything from Nintendo is fair game IMO.

It generally comes down to convenience of access mixed with some ethical consideration for me personally. Out of print books, textbooks, and history or research titles that are in the hundreds I’m simply not going to buy. I use JSTOR where I can, but will get academic research as I need if it’s not readily available. I tend not to pirate indie publishers for any media if I can help it. Sometimes I do to check it out before I purchase it. I try to support creators wherever I can, whenever I can. I like that options are available, and I don’t think anything should truly be off limits.