this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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I don't think piracy needs to be justified because different people have different reasons.
Sure you could argue that you're not actually stealing but creating/downloading a copy of something it already exist. I always found that anti piracy commercial "you wouldn't steal a car" ridiculous as that's not how piracy works.
For example, I do it because I don't agree with how segmented the video streaming industry has become in recent years with this many different services that force you to buy a bunch of subscriptions while continuosly pulling content. Unlike the music streaming industry where all the most popular content (the majority of it) can be found on pretty much every serivce. You could have Spotify or Apple Music, not much difference (if any at all) in content or quality.
When I was a teenager I did it because I couldn't afford to buy any sort of media content and options were limited. Pretty much everyone that owned an MP3 player was pirating music.
The entire issue with these arguments, though, is that the opposition parties just answer those claims with “then you shouldn’t be ingesting that content”. If you aren’t willing to pay for it, then you don’t have the right to view/listen/stream it. Free market a-holes will always, correctly, bring up that the market works by putting out products and people paying for what they support and not paying for what they don’t support. The problem is that you can’t pick and choose which pieces or parts you support or don’t and there’s no way to give companies that type of feedback because they don’t care.
I mean if I am not paying either way me ingesting that content or not makes 0 difference to the producer. It is the same logic as throwing excess food to the trash so homeless can't eat it.
The producer and publisher paid a cost for you to have heard and develop an interest in their products. So yes, it makes a difference to them if that investment turns into you using the content but not paying for it. You're suddenly a target audience without returns.
It does, though, by the argument they’re making. If you could only ingest it by paying for it, you’d have to have paid for it. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to.
The very fact that you’re watching it without paying kind of proves that point.