My gf and I have had discussions about teaching morals to kids. In that vein, I asked myself, would I teach piracy to my kids? Yes, it’s technically illegal and carries inherent risks. But so does teenage sex carry the risks of teenage pregnancy, and so we have an obligation to children to teach them how to practice safe sex. So, is it necessary to teach them how to stay safe in the sea? How to install adblockers, how to detect fake download sites that give you computer aids? Show them how to use a VPN and choosing the right one (a true pirate must always choose a VPN with port forwarding capabilities, so you can still seed) I feel like this is all valuable info we all learned as pirates the hard way, and valuable information to pass on to our kids.
I definitely want my kids to know about libgen. Want a book you want to read about? Wanna learn about dinosaurs from a college level textbook for whatever reason? Just go to libgen, son!
And I attribute most of my computer literacy and education to piracy, trying to install cracks to various games, trying to make games work, and modding the fuck out of skyrim as a young teenager. That, and also jailbreaking android phones. All the interesting things i’ve ever done with computers was probably against some BS terms of service.
So, is piracy something you would actively teach your kids? Sit them down and teach them how to install a Fallout 3 FitGirl repack? Or is this something you’d want them to figure out themselves?
Don’t have any data to back it up, but I’ve been using Photoshop for 25+ years, and got the clear impression that this was 100% part of marketing; from what I gathered from friends back then, pirating Photoshop was so astonishingly simple that it seemed deliberate. If you’ve got the software that’s the easiest to get hold of for kids and students, that’s what they grow up with, that’s what they know, that’s what they expect to have access to in future employment situations.
Now that they’ve managed to pull off Subscriptions (and consequently fucking us all over by making it a legitimate business model, which instantly spread to, what, +60% of all paid software?), I’m sure they’ve calculated that the higher bar for gaining access to their software is more than adequately offset by the readings on the yard stick in their Scrooge McDuck money vault building(s).
And still, nobody has managed to make something that can replace their bloated, shitty software for professional users.