Once a pirate, always a pirate

I've been pirating since I was a child. That being said, I don't think it's particularly healthy to pin 'media pirating' as a personality trait.
- Yeah, I basically stopped pirating entirely despite doing it relentlessly early in life. I still owe Capcom a thousand bucks if I am to pay that one alone back.
  The basically part is that I still pirate what little music I need. Fuck the music industry.
  
  My exception is smaller bands with bamdcamp.
  Buying from there supports the artists well!
- Yup. Pirating is about filling a need where companies sorely lack in providing services. When a company provides a shitty service or offers no viable alternative to obtaining something I would gladly pay for, pirating bridges that gap.
- Do you know what community this is?
  
  participating in a community ≠ making it a lifestyle
  
  Yes, why?
- Why not?
  
  Because, at the end of the day, we're basically just downloading commodity entertainment. There's nothing directly substantive about that and that's fine. Not everything we do needs to become a direct part of our identity.

If you have money to spend (and THAT much), you can still pirate, but if you pirate without trying to fund the source of your art and tools, you're a mega asshole. Especially if you have as much money as this dude claims to have. You can find the creators of your games online, find their ko-fis, their patreons. Where there's a will there's a way
- For some people, it's the convenience with pirating. It's easier to pirate a movie from a go-to piracy website that you use than to find in which of the 50 different streaming sites the movie is available.
  
  Gabe Newell agrees with you. He said that piracy is almost always a service problem, not a pricing problem.
  
  I mean, Apple movies, Steam and Spotify or whatever your storefront of choice is will 95% of the time have what you're looking for. The only tricky medium to find stuff is TV.
- Also I'm top 4-5% in my country, but compared to developed countries in not even at top 50% and so many of these digital products are not necessarily priced lower for my region specially the big houses like EA and Ubisoft, so I understand the original comment. And i also agree on the second part that where there is a will there is a way.
  But i remeber donating about 10$ for a small dev that was livestreaming and i had pirated the game because game costed 40$. And I thought 10$ was a decent enough donation to cover my sins. Dev in a couple of days was crying over stream about how donating 10$ is doing nothing and he just would buy a beer (10$ buys about 14 beers in my country) and was just being an ass over the stream.
  I'm not saying all devs are like that, but for a lot of third world country pirating is a lifestyle not because they just want to keep stealing, they just see it as a movement against wealth inequality. I'm not saying it's right or not, I'm just explaining how the thought process works.
  
  I never said it wasn't, but that was an extreme anecdote first of all, and second, I have re-iterated that this doesn't apply to people who don't have such disposable income. Relative to their cost of living, always. Pirating is a lifestyle, stealing from poor creators when you make a substantial amount of money is not. What you sent was enough, more than enough. The dev in question sounds like a jackass and unfortunately he wouldn't be the first with how many indie and major game devs turn out to be horrible people.
- this. pirate all you want, netflix/disney/etc. will be fine. but find and support the artist. this is why i'm now stuck with the crap news around bandcamp. there are less and less ways to support creators instead of the leeches every day :(
  
  What's up with bandcamp?
- Especially if you have as much money as this dude claims to have.
  I mean, this is on 4chan. Regardless of whether this is true or not, the post is blatantly narcissistic. I don't know why it should be here and what's there to discuss.
- Depending which country we're talking about. Top 5% in Malawi is probably still a person who needs to pirate, although I could be wrong about that with 3rd world wealth inequality.
  Edit: Based on the top 10% figure, guesses and napkin math, that's an income of about 5000USD annually, so yeah pirate away.
  
  Are you free to learn or consume as necessary for your survival from the society you're expected to grow to support? No? Then you have a need to pirate.
- What if the product already turned a profit? That means everyone has been paid for their work already.
  Any extra revenue is just additional profit. Why would I give them more money for no extra work?
- Absolutely, this guy doesn't care one bit about anything but the cash and status.
  I pirate as much as the next bloke, but also buy multiple copies of some games because I enjoy them so much, or to get friends to play. I'm looking at you terraria...
  It's for the same reasons I would rather support a YouTuber I like directly through Patreon etc. than by disabling my adblocker.
- I think the point was that despite him being top 5% of earners in his country, he's still poor and thus still pirates.
  For me it's always been different, I've always pirated from a data archival perspective, which is why I'm also a maintainer/contributor of several open-source data archival projects.
  
  That is definitely not the point of this post.
- I think that funding creators is great if you have the money and the inclination. I just don't think that it makes you an asshole if you don't.
  There are creators whom I fund because they give me exclusive extra content on their Patreons or sometimes if I just think that their work is important enough and I want to see it continue. If I decide that I need that money for something else, that's up to me.
- Why the downvotes, he's got a point. Big mega corps that release $70 games while abandoning the old games are the most moral argument you can make for piracy.
- Cry about it. Digital goods have zero value. And I'm not paying you for them.
  
  zero value
  Rofl yeah right, like your face didn't light up the first time you heard the Halo theme.

Anon willl soon be 14 years old
- Ah, to be young and -6 years old again
- People lying on the Internet?
  They can't do that, that's wrong

If you have enough money to live comfortably, I think you should pay for art you love. That doesn't mean you shouldn't pirate anything (especially from big corps), but please donate some money to indie games, music, theatre...
- Heck, I'd say even give money to those big corps so long as they are being reasonable with the price and availability. Reasonable varies by person, of course. But for me, I'll pay for any $70-90 game (the normal price for new games now in Canada), but stuff like Sims DLC or how the original Mass Effect only let you get DLC through some dumb BioWare credits are cases where I'd pirate no regrets even with my current income.
  After all, there won't be AAA games if people don't pay for them. I have (mostly) no qualms with big publishers pocketing a significant profit on those games if they get made well. Bigger problem I have is with games that get rushed to the point of impacting quality, but that's something I see more for changing how you approach that individual title. Stuff like mistreating staff (crunch time) is a bit iffier. I still lean towards giving them my money, since nobody enters the game dev business without knowing it'll involve crunch and I do want the devs to be rewarded for their hard work with a commercial success (cause that's unfortunately just how success is measured in our capitalist society).
  
  I'd recommend only buying good / unique / finished games for $90 - buying any game for that much will just encourage them to keep releasing mediocre trash (mostly talking about series like COD, assassin's Creed, etc.)

My coworkers were talking today about all the hoops they were going through with streaming to find the content they wanted and navigating the byzantine extra charges to share it with their family. If piracy wasn't an option I still wouldn't go through all that, it's madness how much worse the paid service is to the high seas.
- Yup. My gf has Netflix but for one of our shows, the English subtitles disappeared (she's ESL). Took like 15 minutes to figure it out, but happened again the next day. Now we pirate that show because it's easier, even though she has it on Netflix.
  
  Also used someone else's Netflix to finally hit the attack on titan craze some years back.
  No english subs. Have to read the local language. Whatever. The names were not accurately translated. Whatever. I could look past that since they were consistent within the subs as presented.
  Season 2 - all the names changed from season 1. Even something as simple as changing a K to a C is too much and unacceptable, but the fuckers were straight up changing the name of the militaty units and shit. I had no idea who was who.
  20 minutes later, I'm watching the HorribleSubs version with the worldwide-accepted English names and I never watched anime on Netflix. Piracy is a service problem.
  
  I wonder if you have legal access to things you're pirating, could someone call that a theft too? 🤔
- That's what they get for being too stupid to use free streaming services.
  A fool and their money are soon parted.
  It's easier to fool someone than to convince them they'd been fooled.

Aye, I used to sail the high seas, the hull of my ship gnarly with viruses, adware and malware from some infectious crackers or key-generators.
Then I had money, and started buying my software and my movies and all was good for a time. Then my media consume shifted to mobile devices, but I had Amazon Prime Video as the only really available video-streaming service around and all was good for a time. Then I added Netflix, as it arrived on my countries market and all was good for a time. Then I added Crunchyroll, Disney+ and Hulu and everything sucked, streaming the shows I wanted to watch was suddenly so expensive, no single streaming service had everything I wanted to watch, so I needed to subscribe to them all, costing an amount of money I would not spend on buying those shows.
Now I have unsubscribed from all but two again, but the market is so fractured, there is barely anything interesting on the services I still go to.
So my eyes keep wandering to that old tricorn, the hook and peg-leg, gathering dust on the wall. I can hear the waves crashing and feel the tide rising in my bones. The moneybags have decided to press us for more and more, their greed means no single harbor, not even two are enough to supply our demands. So there is plenty of bounty to be found on the high seas again, big fat galleons full of content otherwise unreachable or too expensive.
Doncha hear it boys? Davey Jones is singing again, calling us back to the sea, put on your VPN, defy the torrents and right your compasses with a good magnet. We did not choose this life, they made us turn to it.

if you have enough money, pay for stuff you like.
- Lol. You do that 🤡
- Why should I?
  
  You're right. If you can afford something you like you should steal it, it's much better. Whenever I go into a library I just take a bag and dump all the books and take them home. Why should I put in the effort of wasting my time(meaning money I could have earned) signing a library card when I can just steal? It's THE MOST EFFICIENT WAY. That's how I stay RICH. I never pay. Whenever I see someone about to pay for something they want I just steal their money, why should they keep it if they're not smart enough to not waste it? Their money is much safer with me. The apartment I'm currently living in is so cheap, because I never pay. I just changed all the locks, have triple bolts on all the doors and just stay here. It's mine, it's free and they can't kick me out because I won't let them. Why should I pay for the internet when it's basically flowing free through these wires and air? I just take some from my neighbor. When I go to a coffee shop I just grab the first drink I see that's on the counter. If they're not fast enough to take their drink, I take it, it's just sitting there, it's free.
  
  It's a nice way of showing the people who make the things you like support.
  
  Because they want you to be a useful idiot like them.

Cringe af
- I'm a really great person. I'm good at everything. My friends are all tools and won't ever be as amazing as me.
  Congratulations. I bet those friends are absolutely real.
  
  "friends"

YTA

I'm heading back to it.
The streaming was sort of OK, and now it's wank. Spread across dozens of services, that don't have enough content to justify their existence. No UI linking them all together means you have no idea if something is available or not without checking justwatch.com
If music was like this, I'd pirate that too.
- Doesn't plex have an UI for all of them? I use plex to watch my media and I saw an option to add your streaming services.
  
  I think that's just doing the Justwatch style thing. It's a start, but it's not a true integration.
  Sad thing is, I'm pretty sure Netflix used to encourage you to make your own UI for it. Then they blocked it all.
- At least Chromecast for TV basically does this. I can search for something and it will tell me all the ways I can watch for any installed app even unsubscribed.
  Still, the issue of paying multiple monthly fees to see what you want is ludicrous. It's as if the media companies maliciously complied with consumers' desire to pick and choose what they watch rather than pay $200 a month for 1000 stations they don't watch.
  Now, you have to pay $200 to get all the services that have what you want to watch - and you still have to sift through the drek.
  Much better, that. /s
- Instead of using something stupid like justwatch.com, use something smart like https://fmoviesz.to/
  You can actually watch the content for free there. Crazy, I know.
  Just make sure you have uBlock Origin installed.
  
  I prefer movieuniverse.se, but mostly for older movies.
  For newer stuff it's streaming or the servarr stack. I didn't buy all these speakers to listen in stereo.

The hunt is part of the fun. Like how people will opt to build a PC or a keyboard over a pre-built or pull out vinyl over digital. The steps taken to retrieve and enjoy the media is sometimes a relaxing process.
- Yeah, no.
  The hunt is only fun if you've got time to spare.
  Throw in a spouse, kids, good but demanding job, a place to live, social obligations, detoriating (geriatric) parents, and you're so happy you can just mash one single button and your favourite track, game or series starts to play.
  That's the reason why people stop pirating. Time.
  When time is not (yet) your most precious resource you can see the fun in anything. Even virus scanning.
  
  and you’re so happy you can just mash one single button and your favourite track, game or series starts to play.
  yes, that's why I pay for some things and pirate others, because for me pirating is often significantly easier and less time consuming than paying
  
  Don't have kids then. Much more free time.
  I don't understand
  Making the deliberate choice of having kids
  Complaining about missing out on other things because of said kids
  
  [something] is sometimes a relaxing process
  Yeah, no.
  
  Really? I could understand that point from someone not in the piracy community, but doesn't seem any more time consuming than posting on lemmy. Not really starved for time if someone is spending their time on social media.
  Mind you I don't pirate software or games, so maybe that's why. Pretty much hardest has been waiting for download to finish.

I'm well over 25 years of sailing now (40 if you count games for early PCs), and they'll pry the sabre out of my cold, dead hands. I've made not watching ads a lifestyle and piracy is so much easier than dealing with the bullshit interfaces of streaming companies.
If I have a way of directly donating to creators and not via their shitty production companies, I'll take it. Podcasts have it right, I can send money to creators and get an ad-free stream. If I can't, I don't donate and I don't listen to their work.
In the end, me avoiding ads isn't costing anyone anything, because if I hear an ad, I likely avoid that product going forward. They have at best zero effect on my buying decisions, if not a negative one.
- I'm a lot like you in a way, and I agree with what you said, but I just wanted to note that you are NOT invulnerable to marketing or ads. Advertisement (brainwashing) techniques have been researched for centuries, and with massive resources. I think even the very thing where some people think they can't be affected by marketing, is a marketing technique itself. Probably.
  
  Possibly, but I encounter very, very few ads. So I might take a chance heard product and research it into a purchase, but I'm not going to do the "seven exposures and they're sure to buy" sort of thing.

Pay it forward. I'm from 3rd world country. Growing up pirating gave me and my brother precious memories playing cs, doom, star wars, gta2, rollercoster tycoon, sims etc. Not to mention music and movies which would've cost us weeks of our food money if we would've bought it legitimately. We both grew up and made decent enough money now. I paid for my games and sometimes paid to play old games if i could find it in Steams. Million thanks to all the crackers, hosters, translators, modders, seeders, etc. You made my childhood memorable, and worth living despite all the shits going around us where we live. Oh not to mention i learned better english playing games than learning it from school.

I buy the things I want to support. Small game studios get my money. Bands get my money directly, I buy albums and merch. Pretty much, small businesses or organizations that put great amounts of care and love into their high quality work get my money all day, as directly as i can. But would I pay for an Activision/EA game? Or a Marvel movie? Absolutely not.

I've pirated almost everything for the last 30 years from msdos on. But I wouldn't say it's a lifestyle. It's just that most of the stuff I would never buy. I don't need them, they are not important, but maybe I want a taste. I don't pirate music anymore because it's not practical and some of the software. Some. Games I don't play much anymore, but I would pirate them until I have like 50 hours in. Then I start thinking maybe it makes sense to buy. Unless it turns out cracked version is better than official one.

I pirate a lot of stuff too but I prefer to buy stuff too sometimes just to provide support
- I tend to buy stuff I've already pirated.
  I have games bought with 0 hours played because I already played them with my pirate hat.
  When you are a pirate you have a different mindset. You get to really choose who do you want to give your money to, and you tend to chose people who really deserve it.
  
  There are only a few games that I bought without the opportunity to test them before the purchase. And I don't mean a scuffed demo that only gives you a very shallow impression of how the different game systems interact with each other, I mean actually being able to play the damn game.
  I don't subscribe to the idea of hype purchasing just to shit on the game after release because it's inevitably gonna be trash. Last time I made that mistake was with D3, oh boy, was that game a dumpster fire on release. The next thing I'm gonna buy without testing it first will be the Fangs of Asterkarn expansion for Grim Dawn. The devs are awesome, the base game is awesome and the last 2 DLCs were awesome too, so that's why I don't need my pirate hat in this instance.
- Pirate the music, buy the vinyl is how I do it.
  
  Even better: buy a ticket to a concert and buy a shirt. Especially for smaller bands, this is where they make money.

I've been pirating for twenty years and you do kind of just stick with it even when you can afford stuff.
That said, when I reinstalled Windows a while ago, I was fannying about for aaaaaages trying to get a cracked version of Office to work when I suddenly realised I could just buy it for a tenner and not have to fuck about 😂 It hadn't occurred to me before
- Yeah office is literally the only thing that's not worth it. Lifetime office 2019 is like 20 euro. This will die out with the subscription shit taking place though
  
  Wasn't it like 120€ ten years ago?

4chan and randomly using slurs for no reason
- When in Rome...

There're a couple of huge downsides (for me personally) to streaming services that just grinds with me:
the quality is always worse than physical media, and
scrobbing (moving back and forwards in the video, with the arrow keys or by moving the playback head) is almost never instantaneous, it usually requires a couple of seconds while the video rebuffers
Perhaps physical media is better these days (than DVDs were) for scrobbing, but then you have the FBI piracy messages to deal with. I've never owned a BluRay player, perhaps they're better?
But I know that sailing the high seas gets me a high-quality video, and I can jump backwards ~5 seconds instantaneously when I've not heard a bit a of dialogue.

When i search roku for a movie made in 1969 and its $9.00 to rent or 15 to "buy" on their shitty platform......
Ahoy, matey

I mean, if you can afford it you should support industries. I pirate a lot. Movies. Games. Music. Etc. Nothing wrong with that IMO, at this point piracy is the closest we can get to true ownership over anything because the entire industry has f*cked over consumer rights for assumed profit. But I still buy physical releases because I don't want content I enjoy to die and I like building a collection of good content. Blurays are great (although also DRM encumbered :/), nothing beats the smell of new manga, and at this point music streaming is just a far better experience than piracy (I use qobuz). If you're young or poor then do what you have to to enjoy yourself. If you're an adult with a great salary then don't be an entitled prick. If theirs ways to support content you enjoy you should. If such ways aren't provided like most Netflix originals not having blurays then fck Netflix release some blurays if you want my money.

- It's almost as if we're all different people.
- I pirate because it's more convenient, surprisingly I don't pirate games and music because of steam and spotify, steam is just convenient, so is spotify it's more convenient than fucking around with finding music you like
  movies/tv shows it's more convenient to have my own plex server
- We pirate because we're selfish but use every excuse in the book to convince ourselves otherwise...
  
  If we were selfish, we wouldn't be sharing our files in the first place, and the system would fall apart.
  It's the fact that we aren't selfish that filesharing works at all.
- Gaben himself in interviews says all data points towards the best way to combat piracy is by providing a good service/convenience. The biggest reason for piracy isn't money, surprisingly.
  Personally I stopped sailing when streaming services just started. They were reasonably priced, they weren't fragmented, and I could hop to another one for a month and catch up on their exclusives. Then they started becoming bastards in every single aspect of convenience and cost so back to sailing.
- Are you kidding me? I pirate because I'm not paying for a profitable product that I could otherwise get for free.
  If you want to line the pockets of executives and investors, go right on ahead. You have plenty of others to fit in with.
- I do only pirate because the prices are too high.
  I just never specified how high is too high 😏

I will torrent the latest movie, but I will buy the latest album from my favorite band directly off Bandcamp. Might even buy a t-shirt or some stickers.

I think for movies and music this is totally true. Video games less so but not impossible
- I can't think of the last game I wanted to play that wasn't cracked within week 1
- I always pay for vijia but I wait for like a year or two and get em at a heavy discount.
  I haven’t bought a movie or a music in 20 years. Well that’s a lit, I bought a bunch of FLACs from a guy whose music I loved because he’s a small artist and I want to see him bigger.
  Other than that… movie, shows, and a music are a YOINK

I don’t pirate games because Steam just makes it more convenient, and sites like IsThereAnyDeal make it easy to find sales.
However, as someone that’s been a hobbyist developer for 15 years, and never really been able to overcome the imposter syndrome to be able to publish anything, I’d be happy if someone thought my game was even worth the time to pirate, much less be paid for.

I can afford Crunchyroll at this point, but I still watch exclusively from Aniwave (formerly 9anime)

Piracy is whatever. Using an old school ass MP3 player in 2023 is unhinged though. I'm sure their phone can do whatever that MP3 player can do just as easily.
- Media server would be perfect, like a personal Spotify. I do it with Jellyfin
- As big media has screwed us by changing their offerings from products to services, as such I have changed my perspective about piracy. I will gladly patronize a creative by paying for their services, i.e. attending their performances. Their performance is a service. Their products, the media, is no longer. Copy it as you wish. They want to change the rules on us and convert what we buy from products to services which milk every last penny from us, contributing to this disastrous economy, they're going to get a taste of their own medicine. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. They don't like it when you used the rules they changed (intending to milk your wallet dry) against them. Boo hoo. I guess they don't get that last million dollars. Meanwhile, we work 80 hours a week just to break even financially, but driving us further and further to the brink of madness, knowing that unless some revolution changes things, we will never be privileged enough to have earned enough money to accrue enough savings to retire, they'd rather have us poor and beholden to the 1%-ers above us. You should know this famous saying, "boss makes a dollar, I make a dime". The people are starting to fight back with unprecedented coordination, thanks to the presence of the internet, which really hasn't been present in previous revolutions. Big media has weaponized it against us, and we can do the same. We, the poor, use it to share our thoughts, which lead to a coordinated action to take them down a few pegs. The shit is rolling uphill, and the top brass is quietly panicking, rest assured they know where the real power comes from. Us.
  Today I was driving and I saw graffiti that really resonated with me. "I miss America" was written. I know the America they're referring to. The America that existed before the rich fine tuned their weaponized capitalism, perfecting it in order to extract the most mosyndromecough) don't want to acknowledge any responsibility for the effects of their actions. We're about to see a miracle, folks,grab your money... shit is about to roll uphill! I can't wait to see the looks on their faces when they begin breaking down yelling, searching for others to blame during their final days in office, trying possible at all times, whether it's immoral or unethical, they blame their inhuman position of inhumanity on "fiduciary duty to stockholders". This garbage needs to stop. We, the laborers, are being driven to mental destruction. Why don't they why they are the reason people are snapping, having psychological meltdowns and shooting up public places. All these mass shootings are the signs and symptoms of a sick society, they just prefer not to connect A and B. They don't consider modern slavery being a factor in the deteriorating mental health of the entire working class, the 4 no room to retire based on the rules set forth from day 1, so they've effectively given them nothing to lose. The concept of "company loyalty" is a joke, because time after time, they've clearly demonstrated zero care about their employees, and illustrated there will be no 2-week notice when their that ć5d 0żdcorporate bean counter decides they could save money by giving employee A the tasks and responsibilities that employee B formerly had, and ditchingd##€l9765 kemployee B. Our overlords (especially those with out of control ego problems, coughorange Chevy Chase syndromecough). They will predict to deflect ownership of the disaster that has finally reached them. You know what they say, when a good The silver lining is by that point, the effects of the situation** they've created, which us poors have been living in, will be unstoppable. It's just a matter of time now.
- Nah, sometimes an MP3 player is important for when the phone goes flat or when you need to conserve your phone battery over the long run
  
  That hasn't been a concern for me since the early days of the modern smartphone era. But I can see it being an issue for older phones with worn out batteries or something.

What a twat. Imagine your personality being you don't support creatives because you are addicted to stealing.
- I support creatives with direct donations. When you buy Netflix, you're supporting extraordinarily wealthy capitalists.
  If you actually care about supporting creatives, end all your subscriptions, pirate all your media, and give 100% of your previous subscription costs directly to the creatives you want to support.
- IIRC paying for streaming services rarely supports creatives beyond a fraction of a cent per play tho
- How many times do we have to write this exact line? "Piracy is not stealing, as the original remains in the hands of the owner. Piracy is simply making a copy and distributing it."
  It''s not a morally correct act to be sure, however we really need to come up with a better terminology.
  I do agree with your assessment of this particular twat though.
  
  You have to keep saying it because it's not true. I've known artists who have seen their work stolen. Until then I never truly understood the hurt it causes them. I watched a normally jovial friend spiral into anger and depression. Sure, pirating some garbage Marvel movie isn't going to impact much. But you take that same mindset and scale it down, and now you are hurting real people.
- Copying is not theft (1 minute)

Or, pirate because it’s what Jesus would do.
Jesus 2024 gets sent straight to jail for just copy pasting everything for everybody, completely ruining the economy. You wouldn’t just download food for the hungry? Think about the corpo farms.
- I am an anti-theist. I am a follower of Jesus mythos. In the words of Mahatma Gandhi - “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”
  A Middle-Eastern Jewish Socialist walks into a marketplace...
- Today is Aaron Swartz day
  https://programming.dev/post/5769498
- Imagine the faces on the baker and fisherman when when Jesus copy pasted their hard grafted produce to feed his five thousand starving followers.

Ironically piracy actually costs more than streaming if you intend to preserve media.
- Money is not the issue to me. I'll happily pay for every episode I watch, maybe even per download. I just don't want my content scattered across different platforms in suboptimal quality and be forced to pay a fixed fee even if I just need the one show on that platform.
  It's a service issue.
  
  If media/publishing companies would just throw the exclusivity model in the trash where it belongs (and let DRM die too), then everyone could pay to see what they want on their platform of choice without this bullshit. As long as that's not the case, I don't see myself using these "services".
  
  I just don’t want my content scattered across different platforms in suboptimal quality and be forced to pay
  That and also the fact that sometimes content vanishes from those platforms because of licensing agreements and/or get censored like many older TV Shows have gotten.
  
  Pretty much all of piracy is. That philosophy more or less birthed steam.
- How so?
  I have 32tb, bit overkill 8 tb HDD ~$180 X4= $720
  Netflix (no ads) 22.99 22.99/720=31.3
  As long as you use it for 3 or so years, it pays for itself. The only difference is you have both the hardware and the movies forever.
  
  AND you have access to NEARLY EVERYTHING, with the right trackers…. vs one sub to n-flix getting you 2% of shows. My server has Simpsons S01-s13 randomizer, KotH randomizer, and Futurama randomizers… can’t get that on Netflix!
- Not really over a 5 year period, especially if you talk about more than a single subscription service. If you mean by preserve as keeping a full 3-2-1 backup, then yeah sure, but most people don't need that. Double backup the truly important/rare content, everything else can be redownloaded in case of tragedy.
  For posterity, 1 year of HBO Max or Disney+ is $150. Over 5 years that's $750. If you are someone who knows you annually rewatch content, then that's likely a guaranteed expense. Btw, if you pay month to month unless it's less than 8 months of the year, monthly is more expensive, so I'm being generous here. No managing monthly subscriptions is also a major benefit.
  That price nets you at least six 8TB HDD's at $109 each, which 48TB is far more storage than most people would ever need so some of that cost can go to a power efficient Optiplex and some to spare for a VPN leaving you with at least 32TB.
  As mentioned, each additional streaming service is going to exponentially increase that cost, further justifying your investment, and the peace of mind that whatever service hasn't removed it.
  Technically you use your time to pay for "setting up and maintaining it" but... That's some BS honestly. Plex/Jellyfin are set up once and forget about them. Us nerds put in time to curate and go the extra mile, but most people can very easily have a simple low power server running. If they can set up the *arrs (not really very hard) then good automation for them, if not manually searching for what you want as you want it is one more step than a subscription. More steps if you need to sign up for the first time ;)
  Granted - a streaming service doesn't charge you $325 for the initial server+storage, however streaming services also don't give you a lot of things for 2.10 years of streaming so I'd say it's worth the investment. And it definitely does not cost more to preserve your media if you subscribe to more than 1 service. If you subscribe to only one and cancel monthly and spend your time managing that then maybe. (but if you don't need 4k and consume that little content, you may still be better off with a Pi-like and a hard drive...)
- It depends very much how and why you pirate. I guess for many it is a hobby, they are data horders, etc. If you only stream pirated media online and use free cracked software like I mostly do, it is also totally free to pirate. But it costs you another resource then: time! So yes, piracy has a cost, the effort you have to put into it. It's the same like trying to avoid the big five. Installing a custom os on your phone, blocking ads and intrusive trackers, selfhosting stuff etc all takes a lot of time and effort. So most people just pay for this stuff with their money or with their data out of convenience. When it gets too pricey, then they start finding alternatives. I would argue that we shouldn't let convenience deter us from trying to be independent and having our sovereignty over our personal data respected.

From Limewire to QBitorrent, I've been sailing since I've had a computer.
It's crazy that people aren't aware of the alternatives out there, when all it takes is a little googling. But I guess that's just a sign that the likes of Netflix and Spotify have a stranglehold on mainstream consumers though

The RIAA drove me to piracy in the early days.
Then stuff like Google Play music came along and I stopped because I can actually pay for basically any song I want to listen to, all at my fingertips and that is still true. It makes me happy to support the artists and their music though I know they don't get very much of the cut.
The MPAA was much of the same story.
Then Netflix happened and I was all set for the same thing to happen, but it didn't. Now streaming is almost as fractured as cable TV packages, and I went right back to piracy.
Screw it. I don't feel bad about it because they haven't shown any regard for the people they continually exploit, namely their customers. They don't give any shits if I financially sink while trying to afford to enjoy the things that they make, so I won't give any shits about their financial situation while I enjoy it anyways. Fuck them.

I pay for netflix, prime, disney+, paramount+, youtube premium, nebula, and a few more services. I buy music and movies, if available, on bluray and rip them to my own jellyfin server.
And yet, about 20% of what I watch, I've got to pirate because there's no reasonable way to actually watch it. Legal ways often only have the German dub, or are lower quality.
(When I was younger, my family was relatively poor, so back then I obviously pirated everything, but once I could afford it I wiped my entire collection and bought the exact same content properly again, for moral reasons obviously but also because I prefer to do rips myself so they've got proper quality).

I personally don't believe in copyright. Nobody should be able to own an idea or data and be able to tell me what i can and cannot do with said 1s and 0s, which is what digital media is. I will find other ways to support artists and creators like going to concerts, donating or buying merchandise etc... You can't steal data because nobody owns it to begin with in my view.
Anything confidential should be kept encrypted or offline of course.
- I get what you're saying but copyright is necessary otherwise nobody would create anything. If you can't get compensated for your work then why put the effort in?
  Hollywood wouldn't exist without copyright and you might say oh well Hollywood doesn't produce much good, but it does produce the vast majority of media you probably consume. I'm not saying you're completely wrong but I don't think you can just go Copyright = Bad, and leave it at that.
  I know that's treason talk
  
  In a capitalist worldview, which is indeed the system we live in, your point makes sense. However, creative endeavors existed well before the ability to profit off of them. If I didn't want for money in my daily life, I'd still be intensely motivated to create, as it's one of the few things you can genuinely love doing regardless of if it's making you money. Being creative is magnitudes more "basic human instinct" than making money will ever be, and I don't buy for a second that "nobody would create anything" without the profit incentive. I do think that we would have a very different system for sharing our creativity without copyright, and it'd arguably be a better one than what we have now.
  
  Dunno man. I feel like there are a ton of artists, that don‘t earn a cent with their art
  
  That's complete nonsense. People make art for free constantly everywhere.
  
  'Nobody would create anything' is an absolute lie that we've been fed, simply another part of the capitalist brainwashing propaganda.
  The truth is people love to create stuff for the sake of it, and many people will create things even when it costs them time and money, because they enjoy it. The only thing that would be necessary for them to create things prolifically would be to ensure their ability to live and work without having to worry about 'making a living' or having to 'earn' enough money to live, and people would be producing tons of content.
  If you doubt this, you're not paying enough attention. People create amazing stuff without even hope of being paid. I have read hundreds of fanfics - some poorly written, some very well written - that never made money and never could make money. They were written because the writer wanted to tell a story with characters they loved. I have seen vast amounts of fanart, again, made with no hope of obtaining money. Especially before things like Patreon - these days you can make some money making fanart, which artists resort to because they have to, but every artist I've ever talked to hates the part of their life they have to devote to the 'business' side of things. Most early webcomics had no way of making money. Even today, most webcomics do not make money - most are simply made by creators that want to share their story and art.
  In the gaming world, mods - free, unpaid mods - have been around for ages, and many of them are as amazing or even moreso than professionally made games. A very tiny minority of mod creators manage to turn a successful mod creation into a job in the industry, but the vast majority do this simply because they want to and enjoy making a thing people will appreciate.
  Movies are about the only field I haven't seen a plethora of freely made stuff in, and that's probably a personal experience thing. I know there's some.
  Overall, I guarantee we would not see less things created as long as we allow creative people to use whatever they want and do not force them to toil for their survival, to have to monetize everything or else lose their standard of living. We would see rather an explosion of new creations, just like we saw when the internet rose to prominence and people started doing this kind of thing and posting it publicly. Only we would see it at an even greater scale.
  
  We should just use crowdfunding instead. There's a lot of money you don't have for crowdfunds because of IP monopolies today. Hollywood wouldn't make as many high budget films, but it would remain a major hub for filmmakers who no longer need to appeal to entrenched business interests.
  We'd get a lot of low budget but actually original films.
  
  Lot of armchair philosophists disagreeing with you, but you’re right.
  Sure, some people make art for art’s sake. But it doesn’t put food on the table. Like it or not, most popular media is created at least in part as a source of income for the creator.
  It’s fine to pirate things if you actually can’t/wouldn’t otherwise engage with the media. But at least be honest with yourself and recognize that you’re stealing income from the creator.

It just makes sense.
All I see is people putting on clown makeup when they try to defend paying for a profitable product they could otherwise get for free.
Mark Twain was right. It's easier to fool someone than to convince them they'd been fooled. This generation is full of proud idiots. It gives them a sense of belonging.
At least they're easy to take advantage of.
- People are straight up slaves to consooming. They'll find any excuse to justify it even on a damn piract sub.
  
  Based
- As someone of "this generation" you speak of, you hit the nail on the head and sent it home clean.
  My generation has been brainwashed to the point that I'm not sure it can ever be fully undone.
- God damn, this comment slaps.

Just a few days ago I pulled an old Sony's NWZ player as they still have superior audio quality compared to phones. I had to throw it away after 10+ years as the battery died.
- Replacing the battery isn't that difficult. You should have kept it...
  
  Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  Replacing the battery isn't that difficult.
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

As long as a company is making a profit all costs have been covered, all employees, suppliers, and producers have been paid. Those in society who have the means and the will have ensured this product exists and has been paid for and I thank them for their contribution. That allows the rest of humanity to enjoy the socialisation of their contribution to the masses, who have not the means or the will, but who ensure the rest of the system is available and working to support everyone's ability to contribute.
If you want to argue that employees, suppliers, or producers aren't adequately paid, then why is there a profit margin?

I'll pirate anything except indie games. Gotta support the small devs

The only "pirating" I do these days is using real debrid and I think that's the lightest pirating you can do since I since have to pay although an extremely small amount compared to a traditional streaming service.

I would say with confidence that your knowledge in computers and solving problems contributed to your success.

what website is that?
- Hahahahahah
- 4chan?

Anyone know what happened to the rarbgdotbest? It was a mirror for taken down rarbg, are there any others? I've tried rolling my own with docker but can't get it to work :/
- Rarbg unfortunately got closed down. Torrentgalaxy is somewhat similar. Also 1337x is a fine alternative
  
  There was mirrors of the dump.
  
  For media 1337x is great. For video games though there was the the controversy of the admins allowing a Bitcoin miner in a BG3 torrent 3 months ago.
  Mostly irrelevant to what you were saying but still good to know for new comers who don't know different sources can be good for different things.

YARRRRRR!!!!!

Once you go black flag you never look back

I used to pirate movies but ever since torrent sites stopped working or started giving you .exe files, I stopped watching movies completely. Unless it's a movie on TV ofc.
- I just stream stuff now. Not the best quality but can usually find 1080p with subtitles at a moments notice which is good enough for me.
  https://rentry.co/megathread-movies-and-tv#streaming

That last line speaks volumes.

I thought we left the memes and greentext back on Reddit.
- This isn't as much of a meme as it's a commentary on the state of the media industry. Even when my disposable income was great enough for me to subscribe to multiple services, piracy is just so damn easy and convenient that I'd rather pirate everything I want and have it all on my own streaming server (jellyfin) and be able to watch everything in one place, instead of having multiple services with hardly any worthwhile content. Having to scroll through hundreds of movies and shows I have no interest in to find the handful of things worth watching, spread across multiple services and apps, is nothing but a headache. Plus, even if I pay for a subscription, they up their prices on a regular basis.
  This is no meme, this is a statement that the only real way to enjoy media without headaches is piracy. This has always been the case and always will be.

Cringe!

In this moment I am euphoric vibes.
Being a proud pirate is some of the dumbest shit on the planet.
- I used to be poor and pirate everything. Then I was making enough money. I got subscriptions and paid for games. But still pirated everything but games because Netflix was just too annoying to use.
  Now everything is going to shit. I still make money but I'm going to start pirating way more. This time it will be out of spite !
  
  I wish I could possibly convey how hard I just rolled my eyes back into my head.
  Netflix is too hard? You'll come up with anything to justify stealing it.
- Being a proud pirate is some of the dumbest shit on the planet.
  Not as dumb as the people who go to piracy forums to complain about piracy being stealing.
  
  Oh, I didn't come here to complain about stealing.
  I came to make fun of idiots that make it their identity. The ladder is very much open season on piracy forums. You seem to be conflating (and other) the two.
- Nothing wrong with sharing your favorite media.
  
  BUT HAVE YOU MADE IT YOUR ENTIRE PERSONALITY YET? HAVE YOU PROUDLY GONE ON TO THE INTERNET TO DECLARE YOU WILL ALWAYS PIRATE?
  If you haven't you are definitely missing out.