Which seas do you avoid?
Software. 99% of the time there is some Free Software alternative that either somehow does the job for my personal tasks, or is better anyways.
FOSS for the win 😁
* cries in Adobe *
i refuse to pirate indie games. i will always buy games that are independently released or from small publishers because 1. they’re just trying to break even (unlike publishers like EA and Activision who have millions of fans lining up to buy their repetitive junk) and 2. they almost never have DRM. i’ll also buy my music for similar reasons; 99% of artists can barely make a living and i really do not want to contribute to that statistic
We’ve been buying stuff on bandcamp friday, it is pretty neat
Apps. I prefer foss apps. I donate, report, contribute and spread the word.
Even if I would pirate an app it wouldn’t become open source. I couldn’t contribute. I couldn’t report bugs, suggest ideas, fork and apply my own stuff.
We’ve had a no piracy rule over in the Android subs/communities for years and the funny thing is, by time we ever got to someone trying to post a pirated APK the community themselves tore them a new arsehole.
Easiest rule to enforce when the community will absolutely hiss at you. Love em.
edit: a fun talking point I suppose is YouTube, and its app. We got a lot of people arguing that Newpipe ‘was piracy’ and I even had many debates with other members/mods about is it, or isn’t it piracy?
My view it’s a website that you can parse even with other tools like yt-dl, and if Youtube.com wanted to stop use of Newpipe / Revanced whatever they could in the blink of an eye.
I had to ‘pirate’ geometry dash apk as only the lite version was on the play store. I’d already payed for the full version on Steam and iOS.
I kinda pirated Spotify (xmanager). I believe Tidal is one I would actually subscribe too if I had the income.
I only pirate apps with no alternatives and very aggressive monetization like 100€/year subscriptions…
It’s not that I won’t but I do try to go out of my way to support smaller artists I enjoy, especially nowadays.
Lucky it’s gotten a lot easier with sites like Bandcamp, but it’s better if I can buy directly from the bands own store.
Sad news about band camp from last year though.
I’m sadly aware…which is another reason why I try go straight to the band/artist first.
As long as they participate in Steam sales, assuming they’re on Steam to begin with, PC games are more convenient to have in a library where I don’t have to manually update each game. Valve’s not perfect, with its 30% cut of sales being arguably too high (as is the case for all other platforms that defend its use as being an “industry standard”), but given Nintendo’s monetization of online gameplay and replacing the Virtual Console system with what is essentially console library rentals, I don’t mind putting up with updating Switch ROMs once in a blue moon if it means not supporting anti-consumer practices. Any games I had in my Switch library that are also on Steam I simply repurchased for the sake of convenience, however.
With tinfoil and a good shop, updating switch rooms can be almost as convenient
I can’t recall the last time I pirated anything executable (games and other software). There are legitimate free options for everything I’ve wanted, and executable code is just too risky.
well gog games can be safely pirated because the executables you’re getting are signed with their digital signature.
it’s much less morally correct tho, especially because most of the games published on gog are indie games, but if you have literally no money to spend (like I used to) there aren’t any better options
So there is a thing I kind of pirate, but not entirely – e-books.
But thing is, our public library page has e-books and some of them are available to be read online. Now I cannot officially download them, however opening a network tab on browser console shows me a request to download the whole
.epubfile. So what I do is copy that request ascurland just download it via terminal.Is it piracy, probably, is this resource publicly available for me to read, definetly yes.
Other than that I don’t really pirate much else.
Usually music made by artists from my country, if they have a website where I can pay for their music directly to them I do it that way.
🙌🏻 I buy CDs and newer unseal them, but pirate the songs because it’s more convenient.
Sometimes I rip CDs to replace music I’ve already pirated just for the feeling of having music I ripped myself.
Makes no sense, I know, but music is just for the feeling after all.I prefer high res over CD quality 😇 but I think I can relate.
I mean, I can put up with far worse quality.
In some cases I have to. For example I have some classical songs ripped from YouTube that sound absolutely horrible, but I am kinda accustomed to those specific performances, and it’s not always possible to find a better recording from one specific performance. And the other ones just sound… off. Sometimes this is also the case with remasters.
The worst one I have is a song from Beatles I am keeping both because it’s one of the first files I downloaded when I was 8 and however weird it sounds, I got used to the compression artifacts. It’s 32kbps HE-AAC at 22.05kHz sample rate. I don’t even know its name. The name and metadata is in Chinese.
Anything that is an executable on PC (software / games) due to security risk. Game ROMs for emulators are fine.
Same
i try to pay indie devs whenever i can
Food for thought. If you have decided you were never going to buy the game, what’s the harm in pirating it
Honesty as an aspiring indie dev myself, I wouldn’t mind you pirate my game BUT I just buy cheap indie games on sale without not being sure if I’m going to play them any time soon. Best case scenario I found new favorite game, worst case scenario, I just payed 8€ (-the expenses from the store) to some developer chasing their dream.
My wallet can take it and I like to support indie scene.
Fuck yeah! Good on ya :)
sometimes i decide its worth my money after i play it
If you were never going to buy it, why pirate it?
To check it out and realize I don’t like it after like 15 minutes and then not have to deal with a refund.
Gimme a demo at least.That indicates that you might buy it if it’s good. The person I replied to implied they would never have purchased it at all.
Because if you’re selfish enough you can enjoy the game at no cost to you guilt free.
I’m just pointing out the facts here.
DRM-free ebooks. I make a point of buying them, of thanking the publisher… And not sharing it on the usual piracy channels.
Not refusing, but lately I basically don’t pirate games anymore. Steam made it so easy to buy games… + pirating games is always a pita with the required hacks etc. (or at least it was way back when I did it).
Software I don’t pirate, I just use foss stuff wherever I can.
I also don’t pirate books in general. Just get them on Kindle and support the author (and unfortunately also Jeff bezos)
I pay for Netflix (mainly for kids) and go to the theater for big movies, but aside from that I pirate all screen content.
I also pirate comics, but that’s 90% because it’s almost impossible to get them legally where I live. I would pay for DC unlimited if it was available in my neck of the woods.
I’m pretty much the same. Although my e-reader supports generic epub files, so I go to whichever book shop site and look for ebooks.
When I bought my e-reader, I specifically looked for one that wouldn’t lock me into their ecosystem too much.
Could you suggest me an e-reader?
I’ve been using Kobo Libra 2 for more than a year now. It’s good for me as I mostly read books. It’s black and white and has adjustable (intensity and temperature) backlight. One thing I’d recomend – get a case as well. The screen is rather soft and scraches easily.
Other than that I can’t recomend much else since I haven’t had anything else. It’ll depend very much on your use case: do you need a collored screen, what do you intend to read, comics, PDFs, regular books.
Reading regular books screen size does not matter as much as for PDFs and comics. And for comics colored screen might be a better choise.
My general recomendation: an adjustable backlight is a must, both intensity and temperature, deside on a size and color requirements and start looking for something in your price range. Kobo and Onyx were the brands I looked at first, but there are others.
Thank you for your suggestion. I found an old Android tablet. I used ForceDoze app using Shizuku (temp root) to prolong battery life for 3 days for using 3 hour daily. And using Moonreader + for my books with reading mode and put on a hazy screen protector. It works wonderfully now. Setup was a bit of hassle. But now it’s done.
Kobo is where its at, Amazon has locked down their ecosystem to prevent piracy. Which also made my paperwhite garbage. Unless you’re using Kindle Unlimited its not really worth going for kindle
Antivirus softwere. i cant even began to describe how horribly wrong can that go
I mean who the fuck pirate that, you went out of your way to pirate a software from a shady website just to protect yourself from other files u download from other shady websites
Newer malware wouldn’t be easily detected. Linux app stores should be proactive when reviewing apps.
ESET Endpoint, ESET used to be easy to pirate, box+Mara fix, then they patched that loophole and I was forced to subscribe to it (until I switched to Linux anyway) but I thought about putting eset on my windows VM and checked out the latest options for pirating it and I found out about ESET Endpoint which is self hosted antivirus for corporate environments. So we have pirates running their own Endpoint servers…virus definitions hosted by other pirates. That scared me a bit.
Not so much refuse, but I don’t currently pirate games or music. The systems available to me are too convenient for me to waste time fucking around with piracy.
I am in the opposite boat. I’ve been downloading individual songs I like since the age of 8 when I bought myself the cheapest Android tablet (€50).
I won’t be spending my time to move to some online service.And getting the music on other devices?
I can either play it through my laptop from phone using Bluetooth thanks to pulseaudio-bluetooth, and control the playback via KDE connect which can run over BT-PAN connection to save power, and is also more resilient to noise than Wi-Fi thanks to FHSS.
Alternatively, I can use LAN. All my music is on my phone (and a backup HDD + encrypted on cloud) and run a Navidrome server on my phone in Termux. This also goes for video which I serve from my phone using nginx with fancyindex module to make it nicer. Since I already have that, nginx acts as a reverse proxy to Navidrome. My music is sorted by folders, so to keep things simple I create m3u playlists that get autoimported to Navidrome. That part is pretty simplels playlist-dir/* > playlist.m3u.OK, perhaps the second part doesn’t sound that convenient, but first part needs no setup with most distros. Perhaps installing KDE connect for music control (and more), but that is optional. Actually, the music control can be done just via Bluetooth, but I wasn’t able to utilize my laptop’s media buttons for that, and I don’t want to have to mouse over to Bluetooth panel.
How do you handle discovering new music? That’s a big sticking point for me
I also listen to radio.
But I don’t even have to as I travel by a bus. The bus drivers almost always listen to some music, whether on radio or from their own playlists.
Since I usually sit in the front, it’s often good enough to remember the lyrics or even use Shazam.So yeah, radio and bus drivers. :)
Same, Spotify and steam are too convenient for me. Everything else though…
Nothing.