Paying for DRM-free quality content https://www.defectivebydesign.org/guide/ and pirating the rest. Also promoting the concept of Big Content from Chokepoint Capitalism https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/710957/chokepoint-capitalism-by-rebecca-giblin-and-cory-doctorow/
I JUST LIKE FREE SHIT
Where’s “I’m struggling to get by and I don’t want to give thieving corporations any more of my money than they already get.”
I know I’m not putting a dent in anyone’s bottom line because my alternative to piracy isn’t paying, it’s just not consuming. If I want to support artists or encourage them to make more content, I’ll buy hard copies, go to a movie theater, or see a live show.
Culture is our most important invention as a species. So important, in fact, that we’ve evolved to make it essential to our individual health and collective capacity to function. To deny someone access to interact with culture on the basis of their lack of wealth is cruel and anti-human.
Likewise, developing something like an LLM, which spews thoughtless pollution into the only shared infosphere we have, and displaces individuals’ ability to connect to each other to develop culture… that is an existential threat to the human race and should be opposed vehemently.
Piracy is the forceful (often deadly) interruption of commerce through personal gain. I’m not talking about naval piracy. Naval piracy is the original definition. Media companies just use that term to make people who share digital media look bad. Never mind their moral faults.
Enjoying digital media without paying for it isn’t piracy. You can do that via the radio or TV and no one says anything. You’re not supposed to show friends your media, that’s considered a public performance, but nobody cares. I remember a circus 10-15 years ago telling us not to record because they were using Star Wars music. People still recorded. Nobody cared. (This was also in the pre-smartphone times. So maybe 20 years ago?)
At the circus, I would assume that they had a contract allowing them to use the music, but it also required them to make their best efforts not to allow recording.
Their best effort, of course, was to ask people not to record, and then they didn’t need to bother doing anything else.
Stealing is obviously a dumb analogy, it doesn’t remove the ownership from the original owner.
You are selling computers, I buy one then I find a way to replicate the computers you are selling and I give them away for free, it makes me a thief? or the end consumer a thief?
Originality and work is definitely yours, so it’s definitely a gray area, but quite an exaggeration to call it theft.
Last point is the related studies that people pirating are either getting it for free or never paying for it anyways.
I don’t know any pirates, but I sure do know a lot of people that share copies of files on the internet.
