Technology

Piracy was never stealing. It’s copyright infringement, but that’s not the same as stealing at all. People saying it’s stealing have always been wrong.

If there is no easy way to own what you buy, then piracy becomes a moral obligation to preserve culture for future generations.

Piracy was never stealing, it was only copyright infringement.

Stealing is a crime that goes back to the 10 commandments, it's old. When you steal something you take it from someone else, depriving them of it.

Copyright infringement is a newish crime where the government has granted a megacorporation a 120 year monopoly on the expression of an idea. If you infringe that copyright, they still have the original, and can keep selling copies of that original to everyone else, but they might miss out on the opportunity to make a sale to you. Obviously, that's very different from stealing something.

Forget about features and prices, how about actual content?

2017 I buy this space shooter game called "Destiny 2". It has some problems, but it's decent enough. $60 buy in. The single player story missions took you through four initial planets/moons, the European Dead Zone, Titan, Nessus, and Io, recovering your power and kicking the asses of the space turtles who tried to kill everyone.

Expansion 1, 2, 3 and 4 come out widening the story, adding more locations, Mercury, Mars, The Tangled Shore and the Dreaming City, the Moon... with all the associated story missions, strikes, raids...

And I bought in on those too. Some hundreds of dollars.

Roll forward to 2020, almost 2,000 hours in game. Bungie decides they're done with story missions and removes them from the game. They also decide that the game is "too big" for new players to get into, and seeking a Fortnite, free to play style audience, removes 1/2 of the content from the game.

Existing players like me drop the game because content we paid good money for and hours we spent exploring, collecting and curating gear, just went up in smoke.

New players now have no onboarding point and are incredibly confused because there's no story and no real way to get into the game.

So Bungie managed to completely alienate both their existing user base, and the one they hoped to attract.

Oh, and they have now promised not to do it again, but at the same time, haven't brought the content back either.

It's an online service as a game too, so piracy is not an option. The only way to experience the original content is through YouTube videos.

https://youtu.be/EVH865r2J8k

I don't exactly recall when or where I heard/read this quote, but man it is dope

• "it should not be a concern when people pirate your content, it should be when people don't even want to pirate your content"

People are always on here arguing about whether pirating is stealing or not. I do think it’s stealing I just can’t bring myself to give a fuck about these large corporations. They have been stealing from the people for years.

Netflix and Amazon prime simply won't work with VPNs active, which I use for work and privacy towards my ISP.

I won't compromise my security for their bad services. Living in a non US country, we are also always several years behind on content being offered.

Yeah, nah. The paying customer always pays for the percieved sins of non customers.

Set sail.

• When you take 5 eur from my pocket - you are stealing.
• When you take 5 eur from my pocket, make a copy and put my original 5 eur back to my pocket - this is not stealing.

Pirated valheim, played 20 hours, bought the game.

Pirated baldurs gate 3 on early access, bought the game with only act 1, that's how good it is.

Pirated Valhalla, played 5 hours, uninstalled that trash forever.

Started pirating streaming services when they told me that I can't watch shit anymore because streaming service b and c took the shows, and now I have to pay two different streaming services if I want to keep watching.

The fact that no product is missing anywhere means it’s not stealing.

If you rent your car from Mercedes and I make a copy of it, the only change is that I’ve not copied your car, I’ve copied Mercedes’.

I think piracy is copyright infringement. But like who cares if some big corpos get infringed upon by some dudes.

Good topic, good point, terrible writing. I couldn't finish the article with the author's ego and personal bias butting into his great story.

Normally people pay to see the circus, but you could just sneak in though. It’s not exactly stalling, so what do you call that? The circus is still there, but you didn’t pay for it.

If lots of people start doing that, the circus probably won’t have enough money to keep on performing. Maybe they’ll get rid of the more expensive bits and just keep the cheaper ones in the future.