Well, my friend, he’s kinda poor he can’t afford some books and some streaming services, so he pirates. He pirate books, audiobook and videos and other stuff. Sometimes he buys books he likes a lot out of loyalty to the author (yeah, I don’t understand it either), he likes to read physical books, but yeah, if he hates the author or just wants to skim through it, he will download the book.
He usually doesn’t like to pirate from small companies or professors who are trying to make a living by selling books, but from millionaires & plenty of mega corps which already have loads of money, he feels like it’s the right move to pirate
Also, have you ever noticed that you have felt that the value of a product has decreased just because you didn’t pay for it, thus you are less interested to read it? i.e., had you paid for the book, you would have more likely read that book.
He says he will buy stuff when his time is more valuable than money, let’s all hope that day is soon.
What are your piracy habits?
I don’t have an answer to your exact question but I want to emphasize…
NOTHING in the history of humankind has ever existed like computer data. A 100% identical copy of videos, pictures, and music can be made almost instantly at what is essentially zero cost to the original holder of the data. Any comparison to “stealing” or to a physical object (a car lol) just falls flat because the situation is just so different.
Practically speaking, the world we live in, with computers everywhere, cheap storage, and easy fast internet access for so much of the world, has only been around for about two decades, maybe three. NOTHING like this has ever existed before, and businesses, culture, and laws have been very slow to catch up.
I’m not saying pirating is right or wrong, just that the whole idea is still so new that society hasn’t caught up to it yet.
In Babylon Alexandria, docking ships were required to surrender any and all written materials to the library. There, scribes would make a copy of everything that was submitted.
The originals of the documents were stored in the library and the copies were given back to the ships.
First instance of intellectual property piracy?
First instance of intellectual property piracy?
Perhaps, but of course there are still significant differences.
To make these copies you needed a team of highly skilled scribes and their accoutrements, and the ship had to wait in port for several days.
That is to say, these copies in babylon would have come at a significant cost.
NOTHING in the history of humankind has ever existed like computer data. A 100% identical copy of videos, pictures, and music can be made almost instantly at what is essentially zero cost to the original holder of the data. Any comparison to “stealing” or to a physical object (a car lol) just falls flat because the situation is just so different.
YES!
Nice comment, tq!
NOTHING in the history of humankind has ever existed like computer data. A 100% identical copy of videos, pictures, and music can be made almost instantly at what is essentially zero cost to the original holder of the data. Any comparison to “stealing” or to a physical object (a car lol) just falls flat because the situation is just so different.
old uk piracy ads used the line “Piracy is theft!”
the funny thing is that it wasn’t actually legally theft
theft required (and still does i think) depriving the rightful owner of the goods themselvesthats a super copey way to say you pirate and dont see it as wrong. digital or not its still a product so the rules are the same.
of course the rule being pirate from big companies and try to not pirate indie stuff (unless ur a poor college student)
i pirate all my games and movies generally but i would pay if i liked a game a lot. but piracy is bad for the sole reason of if everyone pirated hypothetically then digital content would likely cease to exist which would also be bad. or maybe not if ur amish
Digital content wouldn’t cease to exist, it just wouldn’t be able to be monetised.
The content would once again be made by the people who are passionate about those projects, and not about the greedy shareholders that want mediocre content just enough to get people to pay for it and line their own pockets.
If there was a service I could pay like $100-200/mo for and just have every movie and TV show I’d happily pay for it. It doesn’t exist, but pirate sites do and they do have every movie and TV show, including tons completely unavailable on any streaming service
GabeN got it right, piracy is a service issue. I haven’t pirated a PC game in probably 12 years because steam works great and has basically every PC game I could ask for.
Totally. I don’t pirate games because steam exists. Im just so sick and tired of the constantly changing content of streaming services, or companies taking away purchased content, or worse forcing ads. I would also like to watch the things I purchased without an internet connection on any device I want. Give me that and I’ll gladly pay for it.
The last time I pirated a game was for Freelancer. Couldn’t buy it anywhere except a CD and there was no guarantee it would work so I pirated it, it wasn’t what I expected, so I removed it.
I also downloaded a Halo CE crack for PC but I owned the physical disk and just used it to play with friends at a LAN party.
Otherwise there’s no reason to pirate anything gaming related, short of protest or something.
TV, movies and music are so hard to find. Lots of people will tell me “no just use Spotify”. No. Go try to listen to Turn the Page by Bob Seger, and not a live version. The only versions Spotify has are the live and the Metallica versions. Try to find Whitesnake’s Deep Purple cover album. I used to never pirate music because I could buy the few albums they didn’t have and upload them to Google music. Now, there’s no option for that. I’d rather have a smaller library with the music I want than a massive one that’s missing my favorites,
Give me a reasonably priced, accessible way to enjoy the content and I will happily pay for it.
Streaming has become untenable and now it’s neither affordable nor convenient to watch what I want to watch. And with how frequently shows and movies bounce around platforms, who knows if the show I want to watch this weekend will be still available on one if the many platforms I’ve been paying for.
I’m just done with it.
The unfortunate truth is that 10 dollars a month is not enough to produce TV shows and movies for. Stuffing it all into one platform can (and should) work, but you’ll be paying not that much less than buying all the streaming services separately.
I suppose streaming companies could set up a two tiered system, one for shows before streaming media that have made back their investment and one for producing new stuff, but that’d only raise the price.
I’m all for making stuff more accessible. I pirate the 1080p copies that Amazon won’t send to my rooted phone to prevent piracy. I pirate the 1080p Netflix shows that Netflix won’t show me because I’m on Linux. I have subscriptions to both and will sometimes use my Chromecast without pirating, but as long as these companies go out of their way to make my experience worse, I’ll just pirate shit on the side.
I’ve also decided never to join Disney+ after they pulled all of their interesting content off Netflix to make their shitty streaming service more attractive. I pirate Disney out of principle. Same goes for companies knowingly abusing copyright law like DMCA to bully people, like Nintendo likes to do.
I try to avoid indie stuff like indie movies. I also try to buy games I play on my PC, mostly out of convenience. I still pirate some games to see if they run on my system (bring back demos, please!) but last time I did that I’ve bought Cyberpunk for full price a few days later.
Oh let’s be real here, this is what capitalism does. It chooses the worst possible option for entertainment because it’s what makes the most money. What makes the most money is not making you happy, but getting you to stay subscribed.
Let me tell you the real secret. You know what it costs to rent a movie online? And stream it? And then never watch it again? Yeah now justify that against streaming services.
I’ll tell you right now, go get Plex. If you don’t already use a media server, start. Because chances are that you don’t actually watch 90% of what’s on those services. So that $15 a month for content you don’t own could easily be $20 a month on content that you do actually own. Not to mention there’s no ads involved and you can stream as many devices as you want from anywhere. Get friends to pitch in and it’s even better.
The ONLY argument for this is convenience of all the shows at your fingertips. Except now that’s not the case and they’re on different services, screw it, either pirate the media or buy it used on disc.
I don’t see what capitalism has to do with anything. As far as I remember, video rental stores started as a concept in the west, not under any communist regime. With how many grants governments write out to production companies to come film in their state, I don’t think the movie business is completely capitalistic anyway, because it seeks out state funding wherever it goes.
Video streaming services make content available for ridiculously low prices. The only way this can even work is that these companies assume you’ll stick with them for a xouooe of years, slowly making their money back off your subscription. The months that you watch less new content will pay for the months that you do.
Royalties and basic payment for streaming content are also pretty bad for the people working on shows. I’m not saying all these actors deserve their private jets, but acting is hard work, some shows involving 12-16 hour work days, and hard work should be rewarded at least. Meanwhile, studios are trying to use AI to own the visuals and sound of a person, which was the straw that broke the camel’s back and caused the current strikes. I suppose it’s a matter of opinion which is worse, their likeness being owned by companies or by the state, but the race to the bottom for content pricing are causing productions to pinch pennies real bad.
You can buy most media, but the math doesn’t work out if you regularly watch stuff. Shows go for about €10 per season digitally (you’ll have to strip the DRM) or about €50-60 for a full boxset of an older show. Great if you only watch one show per month, but I don’t.
Then you also need to set up Plex, pay for a server somewhere, and keep it running. I’m running Jellyfin and I’m fine with keeping that updated and working, but most people don’t care about any of that and don’t have the knowledge to set up something like Plex.
Movies are different from shows. Most of them make back their investment in the box office, so I have little qualms about them being pirated to hell and back. Independent movies less so, but I don’t watch those anyway. The biggest money suckers are TV shows, which are six or seven movies presented as separate episodes, with none of the initial return on investment. They must subsist on the few cents per view they receive in compensation, and that’ll take ages to make back the multi million investment, let alone pay any royalties for the people hired based on a percentage of the profits rather than a flat fee.
Piracy is the easiest way out, but it’ll hurt everyone in the long run. Once it becomes financially inviable to continue making certain content, they just won’t make any more.
Agreed, totally depends on how much you watch. But shopping used DVDs and like I said banding together with friends to buy content eventually begins to work out better for you.
I’m not someone who consumes tv and movie content en masse so it works out for me to do this and for a lot of people who watch a season or two of a show a month, it’s not that much more expensive to own.
What I meant about the capitalism concept is that the core idea isn’t about enjoyment or getting to watch what you want. It’s not about convenience anymore. This is a capitalistic cycle where it stops innovating and starts to poison it’s consumer.
So shows will now be splintered across services, shows will get cancelled for being less profitable, and the overall quality will dip because we’re driving art to the bottom price. Whatever makes shareholders more money. And is this true? I feel like it is. Quality of shows has dipped quite a bit to fit the streaming service pricing.
We can argue about whether people want that or not, but it’s basically just what’s been done with every other consumer item. Dominate the market, lose money, get the subscribers, and then make their experience shittier over time.
This is how I do it.
I pay for Netflix, Prime (only really for the free shipping), Disney+, Apple TV+ and Spotify, if it’s not on any of these then I’m going to pirate it.
The whole exclusivity stuff is just rubbish, I get the reasoning but if you can’t make your content easily accessible then I just don’t want to pay for it.
I spent a decade with streaming services, because for 10 years, it was the best, easiest way to watch what you wanted to watch. I paid a fair price, and studios got a fair cut.
When every studio decided they wanted a bigger cut by extracting more out of my pocket, they intensionally fragmented the market and made me pay an unfair price for an inferior product. They haven’t innovated, done more, or produced better TV or movies, they just demand more for the same.
So, I pirate.
Private property is theft, and copyright/IP only works to hold humanity’s advance back
I think taking it to that extreme is stupid shit. If you invest time, effort and maybe money to create something, you should be able to profit off of it. But the current state is indeed holding humanity back. There needs to be a limit like you own your stuff for 10 to 20 years or until you die, whatever comes first.
I dont have any deep philosophy. I do it because its free.
Exactly. Anything predatory to humanity deserves to be fucked with in whatever way we can.
Copyright is fucking wierd and an anomaly. It has only existed very recently in all history. Part of the reason we have the works of Shakespeare is due to the fact that there was no copyright then, so taking a part of someone else’s work and rehashing into something new was common and innovative. Disney do this with old folk stories, but then they get to “copyright” it? It’s abhorrent. It stifles further creativity. Take that horrible weirdo TERF who wrote some wizarding shit. She would have done very nicely without copyright protection. It’s not needed. So-called “piracy” is just normal behaviour. Nothing wrong with it.
Disney do this with old folk stories, but then they get to “copyright” it?
They can only copyright their version of it. The original folk tale is still in the public domain.
What’s galling is that Disney has profited so much from public domain, not when it’s their turn to give back, they fight it tooth and nail.
I agree
back in the 90s people would tape songs off the radio, and it was a common and cherished figment of culture – but if you told someone today you were recording off spotify, it’s perfectly likely they could think it was some sort of copyright fraud. [hell, it might be!]
what exactly is the fucking danger of not having copyright? would anyone willing to spend $20 on the official copy suddenly just buy a random bootleg for $15? you’d probably trust the proper company, and if anything build a better reputation having better quality than random fly-by-night shops
Disney’s copyright is on their version of the story not the story in general. You can make a Snow White movie using the names for the dwarves that Disney did not originate but you couldn’t use their character designs for example.
I know. Fuck Disney and Warner and Sony.
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yes
- copyright is a deeply flawed system invented by capitalists with moronic consequences for well-intentioned artists today
- i regularly support musicians i like through bandcamp (especially on bandcamp fridays where they get 100% of the money)
- i usually do not pirate indie things (but remember that if your only options are piracy or “key reseller” sites, ALWAYS pirate. you are actively costing the devs money if you buy a stolen key from a reseller (and they are all stolen))
- i’m poor and adobe can choke on my balls
I don’t justify it. I stopped caring. That’s as evil as it can get, I suppose.
I cannot confirm, nor deny.
But, I will say, once upon a time, before the days of netflix, if you wanted to watch things, you needed to spend a fuckload of money, to watch it on cable, with commercials every 10 minutes… or, you drove to a blockbuster. So, you either did that, or you obtained the movie/tv/etc, via a torrent.
Then, netflix came along, gave you a ton of content, at a reasonable price. And- then, there wasn’t really much of an advantage to obtaining media via other alternative means. So, netflix took over by storm, and piracy went way down.
Then, everyone wanted a piece of the action. So, then Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney Plus, HBO+, ESPN+, (And insert 50 other network-specific streaming services) jumped into the fray. Then, they all made exclusive streaming contracts. So, if you watch a handful of things, you would need a handful of streaming service subscriptions.
And- again, the alternative option of piracy, became the better option, as you can watch whatever the f- you want, WHENever you want, without having to pay for 50 different subscriptions every month, just to watch a TV series, which they decide to cancel after the 2nd season.
Do you justify?
If the fucking scumbags didn’t get greedy in the first place, we wouldn’t be in this situation. But, no, everyone wanted an extremely generous piece of the pie, and now everything has went to shit again. Fuck those guys. Isn’t like the actual actors/writers staring in movies gets any of the money anyways.
Couldn’t agree more.
The streamers had it good - they saved us from the tyranny of expensive cable packages, just to access those few things we wanted to watch. Then they shit the bed in the exact. Same. Way.
And now we’re in this place again.
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I am with you. Long live the Pirates!
All culture belongs to everyone, therefore should be accessible to everyone.
The sale of goods only concerns those who can and want to afford it.
Sharing is not theft.
Pirates are cool.
Well said. The world is unequal and the rich in 1st world countries still try to milk the 3rd world no matter what, mercilessly. We just repay in kind. 😃
I pirate all media I consume and seed terabytes of pirated media every month, proudly. Fuck capitalism, that’s my justification.
Same here. I just don’t give a fuck. I do whatever is the least friction to me, a lot of times pirating is the best option.
- Music, can’t easily play it everywhere I want with spotify or youtube music? Pirate
- Movies, scattered allover with different pricing models? Pirate
- Film comes out and want to watch with friends? Go to the movie theatre.
- TV on the BBC I can easily watch, just watch there (pay TV licence).
- TV that comes to the UK later than the US? Pirate
- Game is a good price on steam, buy.
- Game is time locked to the premium edition buyers (Starfield), Pirate.
- Obscure premium podcast, buy because it’s not elsewhere and has an RSS feed. (Plus I don’t mind supporting some creators)
Basically, I have plenty of spare cash and will pirate or buy depending on whatever works for me, not what works for them.
The last games I purchased are Dave the Diver and BG3. Those games have something in common:
- No DLCs.
- No DRM.
- No external launchers.
- Internet connection is not required to play.
- Those games are polished, not broken and activelly supported/maintained/updated.
All other titles I simply pirate. Here are my reasons:
- Runs like trash on day 1.
- 60-80€ price for a buggy mess.
- Companies usually under-deliver of what’s promised.
- Has DRM (hurts performance) or requires active internet connection (hello steam deck while I am on a plane) or has additional launcher bullshit.
- Ubisoft usually copy/paste games (assassins creed, far cry series). I don’t want to pay 80€ for a game with a new map and new skins, while everything else is literally the same mess.
- Not sure if I’d like the game (for 60-80eur). Companies no longer release trials.
Regarding this:
- Not sure if I’d like the game (for 60-80eur). Companies no longer release trials.
Once upon a time, I pirated Subnautica. Played for 10 minutes and realized “fuck it” and I bought both games. Realised that this is going to be a loooong game for me. No regrets supporting the company - those became one of my favorite games of all time.
For me, paying 20-60 eur (depending on a game) is fine and using Steam is more convenient, but in most cases - piracy is usually more convenient to me. :)
BG3 has an external launcher. At least in the GOG version. You don’t need to sign in though and I believe it still works DRM-free.
You can add a launch param to go straight into the game though.
Really? I changed my shortcut to go directly to an exe rather than through GOG, I still get the Larian launcher come up. Maybe I need to choose a different exe?
No, it is just a launch parameter on the .exe file
It works in steam for certain, maybe it will work as a launch parameter on the .exe. Just add it at the end of
Targetin the shortcut properties, so it should look like this:"game_location\bin\bg3.exe" --skip-launcherMaybe that might work with the GOG launcher shortcut, depends if GOG use the same syntax.
I just checked though and I was running LariLauncher.exe, which is what GOG normally directs to. I guess I just didn’t check, I think there was a shortcut already in the install folder and I copied that and replaced the GOG shortcut. In the bin folder there’s bg3.exe and bg3_dx11.exe, those are the real game files.
I’ll add that the DX11 version is reportedly offering more stable performance, unless you really want to use Vulkan, it should be preferred.
Idk, I have the steam version, maybe it is slightly different.
Dave the Diver is published by Nexon so you should absolutely pirate it.
