this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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Ko-Fi Liberapay
Ko-fi Liberapay

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Hi guys, first of all, I fully support Piracy. But Im writing a piece on my blog about what I might considere as "Ethical Piracy" and I would like to hear your concepts of it.

Basically my line is if I have the capacity of paying for something and is more convinient that pirating, ill pay. It happens to me a lot when I wanna watch a movie with my boyfriend. I like original audio, but he likes dub, so instead of scrapping through the web looking for a dub, I just select the language on the streaming platform. That is convinient to me.

In what situations do you think is not OK to pirate something? And where is 100 justified and everybody should sail the seas instead?

I would like to hear you.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Hoo boy, opening up a can of worms with this. I'll give the "hot take" here and don't bother replying because I'm not going to be drawn into (another) debate. Feel free to downvote away.

I think most piracy is unethical but it depends on exactly what you're pirating.

The top comment here is about scientific papers. I think that's also totally unethical unless the research is publicly funded. You are not entitled to that information. It usually requires a large amount of funding and wouldn't be possible without it.

I think piracy is okay for items that are otherwise unavailable for purchase, or put behind arbitrary hardware limitations (looking at you Nintendo).

Also I pirate from YouTube (ad blockers) because Google is an incredibly unethical company and the official app is abhorrent and even if you pay for Premium the "official" method of watching videos (YT app) is abhorrent and does not respect any of your input on what you actually want to see. There are unofficial apps made by nerds in their Mom's basement that are 10x better at showing you that, while also respecting your privacy and not logging your activity for use in profiling you and showing ads, so that's what I use. I budget $30/mo to donate directly to my favorite creators on other platforms.