Can Software Piracy Be Justified?

Short answer: Yes.

Longer answer: easily yes.
- Medium answer: you bet.

Huh. Based on the community this was posted in, I can assume that the answer the video comes to is "yes" and not watch it. But according to Betteridge's law of headlines the answer is "no." I need to argue about this without watching it but I don't know what stance to argue about.

Ah! I'll use the Orbit plugin to get an AI to summarize the video for me. Hm. The AI-generated summary says the video describes an anecdote about music copyright violations, talks about some ethical considerations about both music and software piracy, and then:

The speaker concludes by acknowledging the complexity of the issue and the importance of considering the perspectives of all parties involved.

So I guess the answer was "Maybe?" How am I supposed to have a pointless Internet argument about "Maybe?"

Bah. Someone attack me for using AI, at least that's a debate I can sink my teeth into.

Lazy prick! Should have just put the video on in the background while doing dishes, or do what I did and briefly skim the comments for someone to fight with! AI is dumb, it's not even named effectively and you're dumb for using it and a sheeple for calling it AI in the first place!
Fight me! ❤️
- Joke's on you, I have a dishwasher machine! Robots do my dishes for me too! It is you who is the dumb one, having to labor manually as you do!
  Ah, there we go. Thanks.

It's always moral to steal from billionaires

Most Billionaires don't write much code.

I want the stuff, the stuff is there. I take it. The stuff is still there, nothing was lost, nothing was stolen.

- Stealing revenue it's hypothetical, because it supposes that you were going to pay for the product if it wasn't available pirated. And that is far from being certain.
Me at the grocery store
Except the second half
- Same. And for some reason I can't seem to lose weight.

I bought a quite expensive piece of animation software (that cost over $1000) to use professionally. The specific term it was sold to me under was a "perpetual license." I took this to mean "never ending", which is the dictionary definition of the word "perpetual." You can probably guess where this is going.

A few years later, in the middle of a professional project, it stopped working. I contacted support, and was told that they changed the way they were doing licenses so I'd have to buy a new one (at almost double the price) or eat shit. I'm paraphrasing, but that was the gist of it.

So yeah, if you're thinking of buying a Toon Boom Harmony perpetual license, maybe save yourself a lot of money and hassle and just pirate it instead. Or tell them to get fucked and use their direct competitor. I have done both.

Yes. Next question.

Why do I sneeze when I’m not even sick?
- Irritant particles in your nose. Or you may be someone with a photic sneeze reflex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photic_sneeze_reflex

It's morally good when people access information, culture, and entertainment.
It's morally good when the author of a work gets rewarded by their work.

Piracy is morally justified when 1 is a more pressing matter than 2. As such, it's justified in situations like this:

If, in the absence of piracy, the pirate would still not pay for the goods - because #2 is set up to zero (the author of the work is not rewarded anyway).
If it's impossible to obtain the goods without piracy. For example, abandonware.
If the author of the work would get breadcrumbs of the money used to access legally the goods, and the pirate compensates the author directly (e.g. donation).

Yes. Next stupid question.

yes but why is probably the bulk of it…

Honestly, I don't have any issue using a pirated software for my own personal use.

I put the line where you use the software to make money.

Even then, I have no problem with self-employed people using it to make money. But if a corporation you work for does it: snitch and get that BSA payday.

Can purchasing anything within the system of monstrous exploitation called global capitalism be justified?

- No, but saying to participate and that purchasing software is inherently moral is also fallacious.
  Developers, musicians, creatives, actors etc all need to be paid to live in society. However, the current system rewards the lucky few and large corporations as well as the non creative side of media and software creation.

I am not stealing. It's there, I take it and it's still there. Don't know why these posts keep popping up in piracy communities. Same plague was there on reddit too. Like seriously it's 2025.

Is there a need for justification?

We reject the premise of the question: the onus sits with copyright holders to justify copyright protection.

There is nothing to justify.

I pirate because I want to see the world burn, among other things.

Yes

Everyone has already given their response so there's nothing really to add other than, well, there's lots of reasons to justify piracy. Most of them are even provided by the publishers / distributors themselves!

Also it's weird to browse the top 10 responses or even below, and NOT see this xkcd posted or even linked. What is going on, Lemmy?

Better question: Who decides what software "piracy" even is?

Usability and user experience. I've been on irc, newsgroups, dc++, etc etc. hell i traded d2 items for game keys on d2jsp.

Why? Convenient as fuck. From my perspective, fuck anyone who is gonna tell me how to consume media. Give me a better experience than i can give myself or fuck off. I'll give my money happily (i have subscriptions) if it's a good service. If it's the only service, meh AND if it sucks ass well, fuck off again.

Can proprietary software be justified?

Why would anyone need to justify their piracy?

if they put in DRM that makes the plugins 10x as big (looking at you, Acustica. I don't even use their plugins because of that), or they make the legit version have some bullshit always-online "all-in-one" software (i.e Native Access) which in turn makes the software a bit of a faff to get working in Linux (to install legit libraries for legit kontakt, native access stores those libraries as .iso files and does some virtual drive fuckery a la DAMEONTools), then yes, if the pirated version is quicker to set up and run (and install libraries for), it is justified imo.

Also i hate theaters and streaming services. I'd rather watch whatever movie I think is cool in the comfort of my PC rather than having to drive to the theater (if it's even on there in the first place), or paying for 9000 streaming services now and only watch like a couple of things. The wait for a good webrip (even more so for a BluRay) is worth it.

Hey wow! A headline that isn"t answered with "no".

in journalism they teach you to only do headlines with a question if the answer is no, otherwise just make it say “piracy is justified”.
obviously this guy is a musician and not a journalist, and as such, actually thinking about things he makes….
(i like his other videos too)
- That's what I was referring to. Thank you for elucidating it, though, for others that may not have known.

It IS justified lol.

why is anyone still trying to justify piracy? that's step 2 of a conversation that even non-criminals are on step 9 in

Believe it or not, I've met people like this. I know a guy who was worried about showing a movie to our Meetup group.
Not because he was afraid of getting caught. He thought it might be unethical.
- it's crazy how worried normal everyday people are worried about accidentally hurting the feelings of corporations. especially post-covid.