this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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I am under no illusion that 99% of people who pirate, movies, music, games, etc. are doing it for purely selfish reasons and a lot of sites exist to enable it. But the simple fact of the matter is court battles over piracy have been one of the strongest bulwarks for consumer protection/ownership and protecting an open internet over the last 20 years. So yeah, a lot of folks are going to make some drivel up about how they’re preserving history or whatever as they don’t even adhere to basic archive standards and their entire collection is coincidentally only stuff they like lol, but hey, I still like seeing the wins!
I'll take those downvotes as admission of guilt, thank you.
You're very much on point. I see it all of the time, people are just holding out their hands more for free stuff than giving a single shit about the cause of piracy. "Plz give me link to download photoshop" or "plz give me seeds to download torrent of this AAA game, plz" almost all of the time. They decorate it through many guises of reasons but the bottom line is still the same - "I just want free shit".
And this year alone has seen a lot of awful losses for the pirating community as a whole. RARBG is gone, Uloz is gone (from what it once was anyways), 13DL is gone, Webtoon will soon be gone, Fmoviesto is gone. These are very huge sources of all of the pirated media we've taken for granted over the years. And when they all went down, one by one, the sentiment wasn't "awww, I'm going to miss them" in sincerity. It's more like "aww, now where will I get my free shit now?" and they offer absolutely no resolutions except for the more savvy folks.
I blame loud-mouth, entitled and selfish pirates for why these services get shut down. I blame them because they're the ones going around online just yapping and yapping, eventually it'll catch the interests of undesired people or people who are morally conflicted on piracy. They take action, for however long it takes, the service is shut down and everyone is shit out of luck.
They're the same idiots who storm to pirate communities all like "WHUT DU I DU? I GUT A LETTRH FROM MUH ISP AND I JUST DUWNLUDED SHIT" and 9 times out of 10, people have to spell it out for them that the reason they get caught is because of no VPN or mistrusting the wrong VPN services or not watching their fucking backs.
Now on the other hand, I will not jeer for the times pirating has it's victories, like this one. Because it'd be dismissive and ignorant to ignore the elephant in the room that the core reason why piracy still continues is become of the stomping of consumer rights and the draconian practices of the entertainment industry that not a lot of people are holding accountable for why shit is the way it is.
It is shocking how many people don’t know how to use a VPN when proton is like $5 and takes all of 10 seconds to set up.
It seems I pissed a few people off with my comment, but hey, if you feel I’m talking about you maybe you should think about it folks!
Let me also be clear that I am not against pirating. I am against covering it with window dressing and pretending we aren’t all doing what we know we’re doing.
Especially with how much it holds your hand in understanding how it works. I'd know, because I've used the damn thing.
I think the people getting stung by the commentary here, are really people who I've personally called out in my comment alone. They also don't like the truth of what's being told in general as well.
I've pirated for over 16 years myself and I know my end goal was always to get free shit, but it became more than that where I've started to pay attention about the scope of pirating. I got better and understood better as I went along. In other words, I'm more of a wary pirate these days than stupidly bumbling myself around and relying on all of these services to stay up forever, for my leisure.
The worst I've ever gotten in my entire history of pirating was just an ISP letter. A single letter. I didn't get fined, arrested, raided, dragged to court or anything. Done it all in America, the place where it was a hotbed where a lot of that was going on with other people caught downloading and uploading.
And I side with all of the pirates who're fighting a good fight by keeping the practice alive and duping the entertainment industry at every turn. I side with other wary pirates who'd scoff and cold shoulder the idiots who refuse to learn, hell that's why some places are fucking invite only, for christ sake! They don't want stupid scrubs coming into their turf and fucking things up for the rest of them and asking a hundred dumb questions they've don't got the time to answer. Especially when they've been answered as much as it's been asked!
I think you overestimate the downvote button.
“A few” is an over estimation?
"Pissed off"
Wow.
You’re being far more irritating than any of them. You’re seriously picking a fight over “pissed off a few people”? Reevaluate how you spend your time man. I’m done personally.
Wow
history will never forget joe rogan, the family guy, nirvana, playboy magazine, zelda, 4chan etc thanks to these heroic amateur archivists... lol not exactly representative of the plurality of human creativity
around the edges of the amateurs and within institutions they support like archive.org there is more room to value the diversity of human creation. I hope there would be more infusion of democracy and valuing of materials not of interest to white men.
Africans and Asians pirate a shit ton of stuff, so I don't know why you had to bring race into this
You ignored like 90% of the comment.
And? I could have cited the entirety of the comment and my argument would still stand
la lutte continue