Inspired by a post since deleted, I feel bad for probably coming off judgemental about the poster’s taste in the movie that drove him to consider sailing.
The earliest desired media I can remember that drove me to figure out sailing was DC Talk, a Christian rock band. Pop music was not allowed in my house, so a Christian group was tantalizing and scandalous to a rebellious, young Vanth. Things escalated from there.
When I was a poor student I pirated everything. Music, software, games, you name it.
Now that I have a good stable income, I pay for the things I want because I want to encourage artists and developers. But corporations and capitalism are ruining it all.
So, I’m changing my habits. Paying money where it actually has a significant impact on the creators, (like going to live concerts and shows, buying albums directly from the artist or from their own site, buying indie games from small studios, going to watch movies from studios that respect their employees and artists and unions) and pirating the ever loving shit out of everything else coming out of a large corporation.
This seems the most ethical to me. Don’t pirate smaller stuff. I would say it’s ethical to also pirate where the artist has passed away and it’s just their estate who get the money, but I’d take that on a case by case basis.
First time, it was because I was a kid that couldn’t pay for the movies/music/games I wanted. The high seas provided me with a solution for that.
Then I started making money and Netflix streaming came along making it both cheap and convenient. I docked my ship and forgot about my pirate life for a long time. Everything was good, living a quiet life…
But then the corporate greed caught up and ruined everything. Streaming prices became absurd, content got fragmented to way too many services and they fucking started introducing ads.
So here I am, setting sail once again. I didn’t need or want this, but they have forced my hand with their infinite greed.
Don’t forget deleting things you “bought” from right out under your nose.
Seriously, I did the same thing, early times pirating, only for my whole family. And when Netflix was good, requests for TV shows and movies went way down. I only had to pirate really obscure stuff that wasn’t easily accessible.
But now I’m back in full swing, more than ever before honestly, out of necessity. And I don’t see it slowing down.
I’ve never “bought” digital streaming media for that exact reason, so that happened impacted me personally. I didn’t trust them to begin with and I was right in not doing so. But yeah, that’s definitely also a shitty move and valid reason to pirate IMO.
I didn’t have money as a kid. I still don’t have money.
Cable installer guy came to the house one time… Hooked up internet and asked me if I was going to Torrent or not. I had no idea what he was talking about as this was 2005.
Did some googling canceled my cable subscription and I never looked back.
Got off the The seas when Netflix was big… And then all that changed again…
So here we are again.
I remember feeling liberated when streaming became big. Dealing with potential fake files, low quality, or having something stuck on 95% with no seeders was something I wasn’t going to miss when I ditched piracy for Netflix… then the streaming wars began and here I come crawling back.
I’m on Usenet now. With the arr applications it makes it a lot easier and I rarely am unable to find something. Not to mention maxing out bandwidth and downloading the entire file.
Are we counting like Ares and Limewire? I just wanted to listen to music and could never pay it. That turned into software I wanted but couldn’t buy. Then I stopped for a while and started up again years ago not wanting to pay for streaming
Ares! I can’t find an English wikipedia article about it 😮 Just found out it was written in delphi and opensource.
Those were the days… DC++, Ares, Limewire, Napster, Emule, Bearshare… so many things just to download the latest Linkin Park. Only for it to end up being porn 😅
I never really asked why everything was porn. But like… why?
Cause people like porn. I’ll be honest, when I downloaded some music video or something that ended up being porn, I usually wasn’t too disappointed, with the exception that I now had to go find what I was originally looking for again and wait for it to download. Shit used to take forever back in the day.
Yeah, but I don’t see the point. If I’m looking for a song, I don’t want porn. It’s not like you’d find more than enough porn when searching for it.
My guess is it was a way to “hide” it, when back on the day most people shared a computer. But idk
I haven’t seen that name in ages. I think Kazaa Lite, Imesh and Audio Galaxy were the first file sharing programs I ever used.
Corporate greed.
Subscriptions, subscriptions everywhere
Yes. And also ease of use plus much better quality.
I think it was a game that needed activations to play and I ran out of activations or something. Predictably, pirating it was the better experience in every way.
The first time or the second time?
The first time was because I was sick of paying the “Australia tax” for new releases that took longer to reach us than most of the rest of the world. The second time was due to subscription fee hikes with associated reduction in quality & range of content.
I was sick of paying the “Australia tax” for new releases that took longer to reach us than most of the rest of the world.
Exactly this, except I actually stopped for a long time when Netflix first came out and wasn’t geo-restricted… then the enshittification started.
TLDR; It started as a young teen who just wanted to get games for free; It continues because companies don’t give two flying hoots about me.
Currently, I pirate because I can’t rightfully give any money to these anti-consumer companies that will only victimize me. I can’t own anything anymore, and this absolutely frustrates me. If I could own the media I purchase, I wouldn’t pirate anymore. (by this I mean I wouldn’t pirate the media I consume. I’d still data hoard because it’s a literal addiction, please help!!)
I don’t pirate games anymore; or better said, I rarely pirate games, and when I do they’re ran in a VM with VFIO because I really don’t like the idea of running arbitrary code on my system; even though we have reputable, vetted, and trustworthy groups. (As a general rule, I don’t trust what I can’t verify.) I buy all my games on Steam for convenience, and I opt to use Goldberg’s Steam Emulator (which is open source!!) to store backups of my games, and this setup works wonderfully! I stay away from games with invasive DRM like Denuvo (I play these in a VM), and I’ve long stopped buying EA and Ubisoft games. The only forms of media I pirate nowadays are movies, and music (and the occasional game).
Crazy prices for movies and software like Photoshop. I’m still subscribed to YT Music, but I have to pirate music as silly wars between labels and artists result in music being removed from streaming services from time to time. For the same reason I don’t want to buy movies online - we don’t own shit.
In the early 00s I pirated a lot of music, but now I buy records and pay for streaming because it’s affordable and good.
I used to pirate software but now I just use FOSS because it’s free and good.
I used to pirate games but now I just wait for steam sales, which is cheap and good.
I used to pirate lots of movies and tv shows but then got a Netflix account and it was reasonably priced and good… until it wasn’t. Then I set up a full stack of usenet/ sonarr/ radarr/ overseer/ Jellyfin and boy oh boy is that good.
But now I have a baby and don’t watch tv anymore so I pirate pretty much nothing.
Congratulations!
That Baby will want some Peppa Pig (mine are over a decade old now so yes I’m out of date) in the future so your stack will come in useful again!
My Babies want Anime now
I’ve been sailing the high seas, or at least skirting the shores, since the late 1980s when my classmates and I were swapping BBC Micro software on 5¼" disks! Moved onto PC in 1990 and carried on. I even cracked a few games back in the day :-) These days I don’t pirate so much, and I have quite a collection of legitimate music and software.
Same. Downloading from popular WWIV BBS’s via Zmodem
Convenience. Well, nowadays that is. And I only started again after the enshittification of streaming services started. I buy all my games legally, just motion picture that I get from the seas.
As a kid/teenager it was more about the money. We cracked games to play on LAN parties without everyone having to have a (retail) copy etc.
Yeah steam is where it’s at. I’m sure it won’t last, and they have their own problems. But for now? It really is a service problem with TV and movies.
I can easily buy and own a game from steam, play it on my deck and get updates, no muss no fuss.
It was the early days of the internet and I liked Metal music.
To get me some legal Metal I had to catch a train to the nearest city for like a half hour trip, then walk around to the tiny metal shop and hope they had the CD I wanted.
And I did that. I bought a CD a week from the local store and went on monthly trips to the City.
But I also got them off torrents. Sure it may take a week to download a track but that meant just leaving my PC on.
So I built up a collection. I copied the CDs I bought. I made track lists of the best songs and made my own compilation CDs and took them to work at Deep Pan Pizza, and we would put them on while throwing pizzas at the customers.
I ended up with a DJ case of copied CDs which is still on my loft. They weren’t all downloaded, but copying media is Piracy, and I made CDs for my friends. Fartknocker Volumes 1 and 2 are still talked about by my old friends because they were full of Bangers.
Now I have a Spotify Family account and every few months they add a quid onto the price. The other day I put on The Global News podcast by the BBC and it had adverts in it! I pay my licence fee for the BBC, they don’t do advertising. Pisses me off.
So now I use Audiobookshelf for my podcasts. Currently I’m curating a music collection I’ve pulled from my old iPod in my car. Not sure it’s feasible to replace Spotify but I can try