If purchasing isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t stealing

Things got weird when we went digital.

1. It's perfectly okay, reasonable, legal to record a tape off the radio. Yet it's illegal to download a better copy?
2. It's perfectly okay, reasonable, legal to record a VHS tape off the TV. Yet it's illegal to download a better copy?

"Piracy isn't stealing" doesn't require a qualifier. It's objectively a separate, lesser crime. That correlation is just the result of effective, aggressive marketing that conflates the two. It was so effective that everyone misremembers the "you wouldn't steal a car" ad.

Isnt the free market supposed to self-regulate?

If companies can exploit it, why shouldnt we?

I assume when the purchase happened there was an agreement that said something like this might happen. If not, then people can sue Sony for the stealing. If so, then trying to argue that this means piracy isn't stealing is sophomoric at best.

I don't get why my fellow pirates try so hard to justify what they're doing. We want something and we don't want to pay the price for it because it's either too expensive or too difficult, so we go the cheaper, easier route. And because these are large corporations trying to fuck everyone out of every last dime, we don't feel guilt about it.

Embrace the reality instead of using twisted logic to try and convince yourself that it's something else.

"Piracy" has never been stealing except for the boats and parrots kind.

Theft isn't specific to property, you can steal services too.

The water is certainly muddy with digital media, but this is just another oversimplified argument.

If you need to do mental gymnastics to feel OK about pirating then...idk find something better than this.

See comments below for more mental gymnastics

I'm all for piracy but I still try to spend money where it morally makes sense to me.

I'll buy, rent or subscribe to content from actual creators or artists or developers if I know I am supporting their livelihoods or careers.

I'll pirate content if I decide for myself that the content has already paid for the livelihoods of the creators or workers who produced the material and now it's only the title holders and corporate interests that are profiting from the ownership and entitlement of controlling the content for commercial reasons only. For me this is mostly just big budget movies, old films and commercially produced music.

To me, anything that's already paid to help the original artist or creators should be made public. Locking it away and making people pay for the privilege of the content just to make more profit for someone else is piracy itself. This is especially true for films and music that are so old that the original artists and creators and owners are multi millionaires or just no longer exist.

I may be wrong but that is my own personal view of collecting digital content.

Yeah I'm a huge pirate but I also have subscriptions to publications, buy a bunch of games, buy music and even have almost every release from a few labels, go to concerts as much as I can. It's not about the money for me at all

I used to have Netflix, HBO Max, Youtube Premium, Disney Plus, Amazon Prime and "Videoland". But since I used Linux, I could not stream with a higher bitrate. I could not download for offline playback, I had to jump through hoops to get things to play every now and then.

They also did not always have everything I wanted to see, or I had to pay extra for "premium early access" (Disney).

So I was fed up, learned about using multiple usenet backbones, how to send sabnzbd through VPN's, Radarr, Sonarr and Overseerr. Now I only have Netflix and Youtube Premium for my wife. And Plex for myself. And access to much more content.

And I do not consider it stealing, i consider it to be the natural result of them trying to gouge me while still not providing me.

They say we've got it all wrong, it's not the items we're stealing. It's he money they think they should've gotten from that item.

BRB on my way to keep a rental car.

Look at the shit sony is apparently intending to do. Total bullshit.

It makes perfect sense, and I agree 100% with this statement. 👍