Piracy is terrible, but there are very few places in the world where it still exists, like Somali.

The benefit of OSS, to me, is that it’s not a black box. You see where your data goes, you get it to interact with the rest of your setup the way you want it (automation, backups, notifications, etc).

Closed source software, pirated or not, puts unnecessary limits on what I can do with my devices and my data.

It’s a good way to get your data stolen/malware. Don’t get me wrong from 10-18 I used pirated software exclusively. But it’s not secure or a good idea at all if you’re going to use, say, banking or crypto stuff. You can get a winblows key from a reseller for like $15-20USD. I personally wouldn’t mess around with any of it anymore. I got a bunch of cool art programs in a bundle for I think $25 ($400 usd value) that I use now, and before that I used Krita.

I am conflicted about it.

I was a teenager in the 90s and piracy back then was new and was an act of rebellion, a fuck you to copyright assholes and a way to stick it to The Man (whatever that means).

Now I think more about the damage that it could cause to creators and developers, but also I don’t like to support predatory and exploitative platforms, so I could say I have become more selective with my piracy, and whenever I think it’s fair, I will pay for the thing I have pirated if I like it/find it useful/think the price is fair.

I do all my pirating with Transmission as my torrent client, so both?

A long time ago I pirated because I was poor and wanted to play Skyrim and stuff. I’d download movies occasionally too but streaming services came along and I mostly didn’t need to pirate anymore. Then the streaming industry boomed and the enshitification started. I got real sick, real fast with not being able to fined common movies that were either exclusive to a service I didn’t have or was behind a paywall of some other sorts.

So, I donned the hat again, beefed up security wit ha VPN, got a 6 TB hard drive, set up both Jellyfin and Plex(I need my IP addy to log into Jellyfin and kids and partner don’t know how to retrieve that so Plex is the backup.) and went back to the high seas. I pay substantially less to watch almost anything I want, than to trudge through 7 different streaming apps trying to find that one movie or show. It helps when you realize pirating against streaming apps only hurts those companies and not the creators themselves(unless you take all of the services originals into account, which is a cache 22 since anything that would catch my eye got cancelled after 2 seasons).

If buying isn’t owning then piracy isn’t stealing.

Personally, I think piracy is a tool of the desperate, the disheartened and those that don’t care for awarding merit. The desperate if a software is too hard to come by legitimately, the disheartened as a form of protest if the software/company has draconian practices at play, and those that don’t award merit because they would, if not never, at least rarely buy/rent anything if not forced to.

FOSS is nice and all, but do mind people are expending their time in such projects, so if you think a project is good and you can afford it, I’d suggest supporting financially the creators.

I would definitely download a car.

Yo ho ho bitches.

I once was wearing my music pirate tee, with a skull wearing head phones, while walking in public in the city (Chicago). I was in a light crowd crossing the street and this traffic cop gave me the dirtiest goddamn look I’ve ever seen lol

I’m honestly… In the middle.

My home network is covered by a VPN, which means I can’t use streaming services without punching a hole for my home IP and sacrificing a little privacy - which I’m not willing to do. I’ve gone through my part and contacted providers to lemme through, without success. Even Amazon who CLEARLY knows my name and mailing address still won’t let me watch things even if I own Prime…

So yes, I pirate movies and tv shows. I’ve tried to cooperate, but if my money isn’t enough, then so be it.

Video games I no longer pirate, I’m content with Steam. I also backup all my installs on an external hard drive in the unlikely event Steam goes under or a company demands pulling a game from my profile.

This is no longer true for Nintendo. Their latest attitudes have resulted in me deleting my account and becoming a loyal pirate for Nintendo games. They literally turned me into what they’re fighting, ironic right?

I also no longer pirate general software because 98% of the software I use are FOSS, self created, or just free+offline in general. The other 2% is software I purchased because it was a lifetime permanent license and for software I felt deserved the money for support.

So yeah big tech is my main enemy. If I need something and they won’t work with me without ransoming my privacy and rights, then yeah so be it.

people will hate about this, but as long as you didn’t installed malware, and you blocked pirated software with firewalls (simplewall:https://github.com/henrypp/simplewall), you can have “privacy” because it never connects to internet and you don’t give anyone information. so shoot for it if you want.

There are three points I could make:

1. Most software that is not free these days is also stealing all your private data. The value in these applications is generally greatly reduced, and in many cases, truly free alternatives exist, so the need to pirate should be much reduced from the past.

2. Where the first point doesn’t apply, there is usually a reason. Either the company has used their monopoly powers to force people to use their software in order to do their job or to interact with government agencies (Adobe is one that often comes to mind). In this case, the ethics of the situation IMHO mean that pirating is OK. If the company is doing unethical things to force you to buy something, then doing something unethical to not pay for it is an exception in my opinion. The person would not be buying the software if they weren’t forced to and purchases should not be forced.

3. Access for the poor is another issue where I don’t see this as an issue. The poor will never be able to afford the software, so no one is losing money on the sale and it only benefits the company to have people using it if it’s a locally running application. There may be some concerns if there are essential services involved that require servers or other systems that have to be maintained by the vendor, but otherwise, Windows having been pirated for decades made it ubiquitous. Without that, poor people likely would never have touched Windows and would have learned Linux or Mac or something else instead and Windows wouldn’t have as many people locked in as it does now. So, for the poor, assuming it’s software that runs locally, I see no issues from an ethical standpoint in general.

These are just my opinions, but I’m not alone. And this is not to be used as justification for specific actions, just very general points about the ethics of software piracy. For reference, I’ve done a lot of research on software ethics from both the user and vendor side and used to run a nonprofit on this subject.

Ethically? If you would’ve bought it if you couldn’t pirate it, you should probably buy it.

My personal preference is to use FOSS whenever it’s practical. For home use, I’ve switched to FOSS for the vast majority of my computing needs. I run Linux on both my server and desktop. Most of the software on my server is FOSS, with the one exception being a container using the Splunk free license. My desktop is running Linux, and I use LibreOffice for documents and the like. I do run Visual Studio Code, which is technically Open Source, though I would not put it past Microsoft to do a rug-pull on that eventually. And I have an extensive library of games with Steam, basically nothing of which is Open Source.

I have reached a point, financially, that piracy is not morally defensible. And I’m not willing to get into the mire of if, or where such a line would be. I believe that creators should be rewarded for their work. Though, I also agree that the limits on copyright are way out of whack with the changes Disney has purchased through the years. So, piracy as a moral question is a murky subject, with no clear answers to me. But, the end result is that I buy games, movies or TV shows. For other software, I usually look to FOSS projects (e.g. Gimp vs Photoshop, FreeCAD/OpenSCAD vs Autodesk), free licenses (e.g. Splunk) or just do without. For TV Shows/Movies, if it’s not on one of the streaming services I subscribe to, I may buy it via a digital service; or, I do without.

If piracy wasn’t possible I would probably be against computers entirely