Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Your idea of what constitutes a nash equilibrium is wrong. I buy games because I have them all together, ready to download at a moment's notice. I have the money to buy them and find it more comfortable, thus I don't pirate any games.

At the same time I pirate movies because streaming companies constantly change their offer so I can't ever be sure I'll find any movie there - downloading them and using Plex is simply more comfortable.

Morals play no role in me pirating or buying content, it's simple convenience. Turns out Gabe Newell was right - piracy is a service issue.

Nah, it's way easier than that: pirate everything, give as much money as you can afford to small creators. Intellectual property is a fuck and the vast majority of any money you pay for media goes directly into the pockets of wealthy executives, not to the people who actually make the media you enjoy.

Everybody should pirate, everything should be fucked up

We definitely don’t want more people to pirate

Many of us do. Why would we seed torrents, donate to crackers and repackers, offer useful advice etc. if we did not? Personally I would prefer for everyone to stop paying money for software and media entirely, and for the industries that produce those things to collapse, and the legal structures protecting them to be dismantled, because I think we would create better stuff without financial incentives. Not everyone is operating under your idea of a rational perspective here.

This only really works in cases where people are making a free choice. But since people don't live in a vacuum where consumerism, capitalism, advertising, greed, power imbalances, class divides, poverty, platform decay, planned obsolescence, geoblocking, price gouging, etc. don't exist, a significant portion of piracy comes from either having little choice (I'm poor and I either pirate or I miss out) or making a choice based on ethical considerations (such as not giving money to a corporation that is known to engage in unethical behaviour). Or that we've had decades, if not hundreds of years of elites/corporate propaganda telling us that poor people are poor because they're bad and we must listen with zero critical thinking to our capitalist overlords who are wealthy because they're smart and know what's best for us stupid plebs and here you go, have some bread and a circus so you can ignore your long work hours for pittance pay which is totally your fault for being dumb and not because the system is rigged against you, also don't ever cross us because we control the politicians that make the laws that say piracy is worse than corporate fraud, even though corporate fraud and tax evasion costs countries and communities infinitely more than piracy ever did....

Yeah, piracy isn't simple.

As a cool sidenote: evolutionary game theory is, unsurprisingly, rooted in biology. It was used to model the populations of various species of animals by quantifying the payouts of their behavior in relation to other animals in the ecosystem. Here's a quote from Game Theory, Alive:

"A new perspective was proposed by John Maynard Smith and George Price in 1973: Each player could be an organism whose pure strategy is encoded in its genes"

The model isn't too far off from what happens in reality. Some species of animals actually follow the expected behavior of what will happen when individuals in a population play a game of "rock-paper-scissors"

The side-blotched lizard Uta stansburiana has three distinct types of male: orange-throat, blue-throat, and yellow-striped. All females of the species are yellow- striped. The orange-throated males are violently aggressive, keep large harems of females, and defend large territories. The yellow-striped males are docile and look like receptive females. In fact, the orange-throats can’t distinguish between the yellow-striped males and females. This enables the yellow-striped males to sneak into their territory and secretly copulate with the females. The blue-throats are less aggressive than the orange-throats, keep smaller harems (small enough to distinguish their females from yellow-striped males), and defend small territories. Researchers have observed a six-year cycle starting with domination, say, by the orange-throats. Eventually, the orange-throats amass territories and harems so large that they can no longer be guarded effectively against the sneaky yellow- striped males, who are able to secure a majority of copulations and produce the largest number of offspring. When the yellow-striped lizards become very com- mon, however, the males of the blue-throated variety get an edge: Since they have small harems, they can detect yellow-striped males and prevent them from invad- ing their harems. Thus, a period when the blue-throats become dominant follows. However, the aggressive orange-throats do comparatively well against blue-throats since they can challenge them and acquire their harems and territories, thus prop- agating themselves. In this manner, the population frequencies eventually return to the original ones, and the cycle begins anew. When John Maynard Smith learned that Uta stansburia were “playing” Rock- Paper-Scissors, he reportedly exclaimed, “They have read my book!”

Hope you liked my unhinged post guys :-)

Your analogy doesn't separate the facts that paying for content to the platform is not the same as paying for it directly to the creator. You, and many people, assume that a high % of what they pay really goes to the creator. That's rarely the case

Also, it's morally wrong that a platform charges you for content they didn't create. Yet, know one seems to question that. I'm a bit pissed at people calling piracy morally questionable without looking into the concrete 'harm'... Hence my post last week, copying is not theft.

As many OTT platforms are popping up, the tendency to pirate content rises. Why should you pirate exclusive content instead of subscribing to OTTs? Look at Showmax, an OTT platform owned by the South Africa-based main shareholder of Tencent. It's worth pirating exclusive Showmax content instead of subscribing to. An adult themed OTT platform based in my country (will not mention the name for fear of repercussion from its owners) is literally cringe as expected.

My interest in entering the cinema is losing as inflation rises. Latest titles are literally losing quality, the same for AAA video games. Indie titles are worth spending.

How do you draw your conclusion that you should buy software if you can? Just because I can spend 100 bucks on a game 2024 that is exactly like the game of 2023 but with different names, doesn't mean I should buy it. If more and more people start pirating it, they have to lower the price in order to reach more people. This is microeconomics.

There is no single reason for an individual to buy it apart from convenience or too little knowledge.

Moreover, as long as the people in movies are getting paid more than governers, there's no reason to give them any penny. Adjust the broken monetary system, and I'll pay. But not right now.

Why would I want to give Katy Perry 3 cents per listen? The system is broken.

You may buy a game if it's made by an independent person.

I think the grand majority of software license purchases are corporate, where companies are willing to shell out a premium to free up labour (and wages) on stuff like in-house tech support.

Even many freelancers shell out for an Adobe subscription, simply because the time they spend on having to learn how to pirate software, how to fix it, and the risk of being sued far outweigh the monetary benefits of piracy.

Even I, with my good amount of experience using pirated software, am slowly making the switch over to FOSS software just to avoid all the delicate details in piracy.

I know downloading/torrenting copies of movies that you don't own or have a license for is illegal in most countries, but I'm not sure on how legal it is to simply just view them for free on a site like Flixwave.

I really should look more into game theory; that was a fantastic read!

It is dangerous when the population of pirates to increase, because this will cause things and create domino effects which will put us at nash equilibrium due to more regulation of piracy and a crackdown of piracy,

Nuh-uh. DRM and draconian laws were already being passed own without piracy, or when piracy was at a low. This also falls into the fallacy that DRM and laws on that line are exclusively the result of piracy - they are not, they come from military / corporate authoritarianism, see for example the effects of 9/11 (the US one, not the Chilean one, although they do also are related in this respect).

tl;dr: Everyone benefits if more people pirate.

Adult explanation: It's a dog-eat-dog world.