this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2024
223 points (97.0% liked)

News

23627 readers
2735 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.


Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.


7. No duplicate posts.


If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


9. No link shorteners.


The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 94 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I'm expecting to hike my rate of piracy in 2024 as I continue to take a bigger bite out of overall corporate profits.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 9 months ago (2 children)

take a bigger bite out of overall corporate profits.

Don't co-adopt Corporate gaslighting. They can call it "opportunity cost", "expected return" or other bullshit. But it's all castles in the air dreamed up by profiteers.

It's never their money to begin with. It only becomes so because they want everyone to believe that making a copy of software deprives others from using it like physical goods.

The truth is that if somebody was going to pirate software, then they were never going to buy it in the first place and it's greedy and mentally ill to think otherwise.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Sorry to say, you've mistakenly made one hell of a generalisation on that last sentence. Other than that one stinky turd, the rest is spot-on.

The truth is that if somebody was going to pirate software, then they were never going to buy it in the first place and it’s greedy and mentally ill to think otherwise..

I've been on the piracy scene since 2001 and was a moderator for one of the largest dreamcast piracy forums once upon a time. The core members of that forum are still together on Discord and we all buy things wherever possible. Gabe Newell is correct in that piracy is a service problem.

Steam cut my games piracy down to zero for the longest time (501 games, 414 DLC) because it was more convenient and had frequent sales. Other companies that decided to pull away from Steam and conspire with publishers regarding timed exclusives on a platform that doesn't want me as a customer (Epic). As a result, anything that is an Epic exclusive is pirated indiscriminately and seeded for several weeks. I don't even play any of them. Download, seed for a week, delete, rinse and repeat on the next exclusive. The same goes for anything with Denuvo DRM.

GOG has DRM free games, there's a site where they are all available for download, and I've discovered quite a few gems that way. Those gems got purchased on Steam because GOG also doesn't want me as a customer, even though I had decent library and bought several games at launch on there. I'm refusing to use a third party launcher to install games from there because once again, its a service problem.

Netflix cut my video piracy to zero between 2011 and 2020. When I moved across the world, I brought only my clothes, laptop, and storage drives. Everything I wanted to watch was available on Netflix or YouTube. Once Netflix started losing shows like Futurama, Parks & Rec, and even Sons of Anarchy, I went straight back to piracy and haven't looked back. Netflix only continued to get my money because my partner insisted on doing things legally. By the time she had enough in October 2023, we were paying for Netflix, Amazon, Disney, Ziggo, YouTube, Curiosity Stream, and HBO. At the moment, only Curiosity remains.

Adding up the 3 "services" we consume content from the most (not including the ones we watch one show here and there on) added up to €497 per year. My piracy costs €472 per year not including electricity, which is used anyway since the server also hosts a boat load of microservices like NextCloud which replaces yet another subscription storage. It's costing me €72 to rent a seedbox, and €400 at the upper-end for a large NAS drive one time per year.

It's a service problem and I don't think those who refuse to contribute to the broken service problem are mentally ill. The "managers" in charge are.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Just FYI but you can download all your GoG games through the webpage as standalone installers, only thing you’re gonna be missing out on without the GoG galaxy software is the automatic updates/cloud saves (which have been broken anyway with the latest migration they’ve been up to for the last several weeks)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

I am aware of that. I could also just use Lutris since I use it to install the games themselves anyway. My point is, if the company that wants my money goes out of their way to not produce a Linux build of their launcher in the age of Electron, I'm going to get it elsewhere and launch it as a non-Steam game. Its the same number of steps. Still a service problem.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

What I was trying to say was that; regardless of any explanation for why piracy happens, it is not the same as stealing physical goods. Corporate executives and MPAA types are mentally sick (they can't see past money) and go to the extent of gaslighting consumers into accepting their definitions because if they control the narrative then they can do anything and spin it as normal or only solution.

It's a service problem and I don't think those who refuse to contribute to the broken service problem are mentally ill. The "managers" in charge are.

I am not blaming normal people. I am calling industry and rich oligarhs mentally ill. Because is it not sick to want to do what they are doing?

I am merely peeved by how normalized "piracy is theft" has become, when in today's world corporates plunder the earth, commit wage theft, suppress collective bargaining, and don't want to pay taxes. It's so normalized that even piracy advocates have incorporated it into their vocabulary.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

It seems that I misunderstood your original comment. You're right in that piracy isnt the same as stealing physical goods.

My original comment was a jab at the corpos and using their terminology to highlight how utterly absurd their line of thinking is. I should have worded it better and used "imaginary profits" instead.

My mistake!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I only ever pirated music, i was to young and not knowledgeable enough to pirate movies, so i just got viruses from limewire.

Thats why i dont pirate now, i dontknow how.

Netflix is making more keen on learning everyday.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

I know ... people ... who've been casually torrenting for 25 years and haven't had a virus since the 90's. They don't do games or other "cracks" as they're the easiest way to get a virus because you have to run an executable. You don't run that risk with media files. The important thing is setting your OS to always show the file extension so you don't click on any that are executable. As long as you click the .mp4 / .mkv you'll be fine.

All you have to do is set up a vpn that allows P2P traffic and enable a killswitch, set up qbittorrent, go to one of the current reputable resources, mentioned all over the place, and click the magnet link. Better yet go the arr route and it's mostly hands off after it's set up.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Awesome, I'm going to take a look at it all. Allegedly

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

It's become far easier than it was in the past. The piracy community is very friendly and will gladly help those who seek their guidance.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

I dunno, I'm fine with adopting it, among other language like getting their necks under a guillotine if they don't like it. If I voice that I want their "corporate profits" to collapse, that's rather alarming to them when people state that their goal is to deprive them of wealth in whatever terms they'll understand.

I agree with you, all castles in the air dreamed up. That's really well said.