this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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Ko-Fi Liberapay
Ko-fi Liberapay

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Hi guys, first of all, I fully support Piracy. But Im writing a piece on my blog about what I might considere as "Ethical Piracy" and I would like to hear your concepts of it.

Basically my line is if I have the capacity of paying for something and is more convinient that pirating, ill pay. It happens to me a lot when I wanna watch a movie with my boyfriend. I like original audio, but he likes dub, so instead of scrapping through the web looking for a dub, I just select the language on the streaming platform. That is convinient to me.

In what situations do you think is not OK to pirate something? And where is 100 justified and everybody should sail the seas instead?

I would like to hear you.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

I’d say that there’s a scale

‘pirating’ an abandonware PC game that has long been left by the original devs, and isn’t for sale anywhere legally - this is still illegal under most laws, despite their being no legal routes to buy it at all legally. Most sane people don’t think this is unethical.

But downloading a hacked version of an app or game developed by a tiny independent team that truly care about the product, and invest the profits back in it - I say that this is unethical, as the people you are stealing from are directly affected by your actions. If you bought this game or app, your money goes directly to them, and they are more likely to keep developing other things.

Adobe, MS and the like have billions, so piracy has less of a direct impact on them -

So yeah, for me it’s a scale of ethical piracy - and you have to draw the line where you feel comfortable