•  empireOfLove   ( @empireOfLove@lemmy.one ) English
    248•11 months ago

    Ayo I’m in the screenshot letsa fucking GOOOOOOOOOO-

    For context, Bungiefan_ak has no fewer than 4 alts that I’ve seen (all on different instances with the same username) and has spent his time on !memes@lemmy.ml continuously spamming heavily transphobic, homophobic, and objectifying sexist “memes”. Just about every one of his alts is now banned but I’m sure more will pop up.

    Now, why the fuck he cares so much about pirates at this point, I haven’t a clue…

      •  acastcandream   ( @acastcandream@beehaw.org ) English
        2•11 months ago

        See, this is the stuff I was talking about in my other comment. Too many arguments in favor of piracy are these little one off, no context one-liners that sound snappy/true, but lack nuance.

        It’s not that you don’t have a point, but you need to actually tease this out a little more, and also addressed the fact that most people who are pirating are not doing it for that reason. There is always unwillingness by piracy advocates to acknowledge that some people do it just because they want free shit. It’s not a moral stance, it’s not a social movement, it’s not a financial necessity, they just don’t want to pay for it. 

        I definitely don’t ever pirate. I would never use transmission or the pirate bay to acquire what I want. But if I did, which, of course I don’t, I would admit it’s because of a combination of 1) convenience, 2) the ability to deploy where I want it, more specifically 3) so I can put it on my server to stream on my network, and 4) because of fears of the programming being taken down, such as streaming services.

        I would also be lying if I said I wouldn’t do it because I don’t want to spend money on it. That’s just me being honest.

        My point being that whatever your reasoning, I just don’t like when people throw out bullshit excuses or examples that only apply to .001% of people engaging in piracy.

            •  aberrate_junior_beatnik   ( @aberrate_junior_beatnik@midwest.social ) English
              1•11 months ago

              You were responding to:

              We also pay for their bailouts and subsidies. Piracy is ethical.

              There was nothing in this statement to suggest the motive behind piracy had anything to do whether or not it is ethical. There was nothing in this statement to indicate that the author was engaging in piracy for purely altruistic reasons.

              I don’t see how the author was “making excuses to pretend [they] don’t” “want free stuff.” And I don’t see how arguing that piracy is ethical is implicitly arguing that you only do it for altruistic reasons. I think bringing up the selfish motives behind piracy without prompting is an implicit admission that there is a connection between selfish motives and the ethics of piracy. And finally, I think parsimony is effective.

        •  mayo   ( @mayo@lemmy.today ) English
          1•11 months ago

          I agree about snippy one liners but I’m also not invested in this topic enough to go deeply into it. Maybe not until someone engages. I just browse lemmy, I share thoughts. I’m just here to hang out. If I want to learn then I read a book. I try not to take this site or myself on this site too seriously. I also like how you responded in somewhat long form. I like that a lot, and I’m hoping one day I can join tildes.net and participate in longer conversations.

          That said, I don’t think it’s a bullshit response and I don’t think I need to elaborate on how subsidies work or how deregulation has siphoned money from the public and given it to private companies. For me, it doesn’t matter why an individual chooses to pirate or how they justify it. I see it as a form of protest and anyone participating in the protest for any reason is doing it for the right reason.

          I think it’s interesting that people jump to the defence of copyright, or question the morality of piracy on the grounds of what damage it might cause to creators and publishers. Tax laws - old (austerity taxes), new (lowered corporate taxes), and proposed (100% inheritance tax) are much more significant than any effect piracy will ever have. This is what we should be debating and arguing about, not with piracy. It’s peanuts.

  •  acastcandream   ( @acastcandream@beehaw.org ) English
    60•11 months ago

    I think people who are pro-piracy tend to be a little dogmatic in the wrong direction, refusing to exercise their imagination or contemplate situations where people can be legitimately hurt financially or otherwise by their actions. However, most of the arguments are pretty sound, and I can’t imagine working that hard making new accounts just to argue in favor of movie/record studios that have exploited artists for as long as they have existed.

    The “filthy” line was just funny to me lol

    •  Diminish4036   ( @Diminish4036@noworriesto.day ) English
      4•11 months ago

      I think people who are pro-piracy tend to be a little dogmatic in the wrong direction, refusing to exercise their imagination or contemplate situations where people can be legitimately hurt financially or otherwise by their actions.

      That’s not been my experience. I always see people advocating for paying for games/media when it comes from indie devs etc. And there is a difference between piracy and outright theft of artwork which is then profited from, I.e. a company steals small artists work and puts it on t-shirts - very few “pro-piracy” people, if any at all, are advocating for that.

      At the end of the day, pirates do it because they either have very little money or they’re smart and want to retain the money they have. Then there are anti-copyright people, which is cool too.

      Then there are the people who don’t really know what’s going on but claim some moral standing surrounding piracy. I can actually feel them coming, fuck…

      •  acastcandream   ( @acastcandream@beehaw.org ) English
        2•11 months ago

         Well that has often been my experience, but I’m not going to pretend that my experience as everyone is.

        For instance, I see a lot of really ridiculous arguments claiming it’s for archiving.” First of all, they do not follow archival procedures. Second, they are not working with any known archiving organizations. Thirdly, they are not using what they have “archived” in any manner that could be considered “for the public good.“ Unless you want to count seeding it back out, but that argument can become pretty recursive pretty quickly. 

        It also just so happens they are archiving mostly - if not entirely - the games they want to play, the shows they want to watch, and the movies they want to watch. It’s awfully curious how much the venn diagram of “archiving for the public good” and “what I want to enjoy” resembles a circle lol.

        My point being, there are arguments in favor of piracy, most of which i agree with. But I see a lot of disingenuous ones from people who are clearly just doing it because they feel entitled to the media. I would rather they were just honest about their intentions instead of feeding me nonsense talking points that even they don’t believe. Otherwise it just reeks of justifying their actions (poorly) instead of just saying “I have nothing to justify.”

        •  DreamDrifter   ( @DreamDrifter@lemmynsfw.com ) English
          1•11 months ago

          You have a point, but it’s kind of like people who resist all gun control due to the second amendment despite the shootings going on

          Yeah, if life continues on as-is, the argument has little merit. On the other hand, in the case of the second amendment, we have fascists making a credible move for control.

          In the case of archiving DRM content, if we have a cataclysm (which seems increasingly likely), then having drm-free, ideally unencrypted, content sitting on random hard drives might end up making an enormous difference in a lot of lives

          Or even without a cataclysm, just general enshittification might end up destroying the gaming and media industries - passed around old games might be the seed for the next generation of tech-heads. I started my path by jailbreaking my PSP so I could use custom web browsers and homebrew - spreading these after the Internet is locked down by efforts like kosa and WEI (and whatever comes next) might be the spark that motivates the next generation

    •  HaloMasyerChief   ( @HaloMasyerChief@lemm.ee ) English
      3•11 months ago

      They never think on the people they affect. They just want free things all the time claiming imaginary problems like the government and companies steal from them, like bro, that’s just how capitalism works if you don’t like it go to rusia, Venezuela and see how they’re doing

    •  ninpnin   ( @ninpnin@sopuli.xyz ) English
      2•11 months ago

      When it comes to art, there’s always somebody who doesn’t make it financially. Too few sold albums, too few downloads, too little merch sold. Some artists are always going to struggle and barely stay afloat making art, while the ones doing marinally worse are gonna quit and do something else.

      The number of these people for whom piracy - or any other small loss of revenue for that matter - tips the scale doesn’t depend on how many people pirate stuff.

      The actual difference piracy makes is the 0.2% (or whatever) dent in revenue which then means ~ 0.2% of potential artists end up working in other industries.

      •  acastcandream   ( @acastcandream@beehaw.org ) English
        4•11 months ago

        When deciding whether or not use someone’s art without their permission, it behooves one to consider the ethics. Whether you come to a different conclusion than I do is whatever, but not every case is exactly the same, and to dismiss the people on the other side of the equation with made-up numbers pulled from thin air is not the proper way to go about it.

  •  S13Ni   ( @S13Ni@lemmy.studio ) English
    44•11 months ago

    I buy most of my content, steam mostly for games, have spotify, buy music from bandcamp for DJ sets, at least my favorites, have family netflix, HBO, disney +, although I don’t use those as much since they are mostly full of crap. Sometimes I even buy/rent a movie if it is not available in those and I can’t find any torrent, or just out of convenience. I produce music and buy all my audio software (ableton and fuckton of plugins) because I don’t want to deal with the hassle of using pirated versions. I buy ebooks every now and then too, although with that I also admittely pirate some, especially when the author is dead, in which case I really don’t feel any guilt for pirating it. I also use patreon often and support creators that way.

    I still think piracy needs to be an option, so streaming services can’t have their way and we are just forced to use their enshittified platforms. I avoid it, because I understand not everything can be open source, and nothing get’s done without revenue. I don’t pirate from small authors/creators.

    All the while musicians get basically fucking nothing from huge streaming services profiting from their labor. Series get cancelled left and right despite good reception because they were not profitable enough, although still profitable, because netflix is only interested making next big hit. Games are filled with microtransactions and kernel level tracking (anti cheat), forced online features in single player game and sometimes games one bought are just made unavailable, like with old mobile games (case in point, dead space mobile). Professional software is often moved to predatory subscription models and paywalled updates to the software, like Avid, Waves.

    And people still cirlejerk about piracy being the worst thing to intellectual property ever. Problem isn’t piracy, problem is small creators are payed so little from listens/views/whatever that the can barely get by, and have to make alternate source of income via patreon or some other stuff. Piracy won’t even make a dent in that.

    Luckily in every category some people/companies are pushing back but all of this is just case in point why we need piracy. When I get around releasing music/games, I don’t mind piracy at all, might even put my own tunes on pirate sites out of spite. Current intellectual property laws are fucking joke and only benefit the largest creators in their respective fields.

    •  flora_explora   ( @flora_explora@beehaw.org ) English
      11•11 months ago

      You can summarize that in just simply saying: capitalism is the problem. Just with anything else, capitalism doesn’t care to give us the best entertainment, it simply will benefit the ones with the most profit. So long we live under capitalism, this will be the underlying problem. Capitalism doesn’t care about what people want or need.

    •  SnowdenHeroOfOurTime   ( @SnowdenHeroOfOurTime@unilem.org ) English
      11•11 months ago

      After Adobe fucking me out of thousands, I swore I’d make sure I never gave them another cent. if there weren’t greedy scumbags I would’ve paid for upgrades (hundreds of bucks) to the master collection every 5-10 years. Now, because that wasn’t enough for them, they’ll never EVER get another dime from me. I encourage pirating their shit because fuck them. What they did to their customers was unconscionable. When I called to ask them to make this right, after essentially breaking their promise to me that this enormous purchase was an investment, their best offer? 25% of my first year of cloud. Lol… Would’ve still felt like the shaft of they gave it to me free for 5 years.

    •  Hudell   ( @Hudell@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) English
      10•11 months ago

      Same. I make good money today and I can pay for the stuff I use, but when I get some nostalgia and feel like playing a game from my childhood like The Little Samson, my only option is to go cry on a corner because the game isn’t available anywhere and is worth 3 thousand dollars minimum - which even if I paid would never go to the folks who made the game anyway.

      When I was a teenager I couldn’t afford anything. I didn’t even had a computer or a video-game of my own, I started working at a Lan house when I was 14 just to be able to afford an occasional snack. I played a bunch of SNES games at that time thanks to emulators - if piracy wasn’t an option I would never have played them and probably wouldn’t have gotten into videogames that much. 6 years later I managed to buy a DS and a couple games. Since then I’ve bought several consoles and a ton of games for each of them. Nintendo made several thousand dollars from me over the years and that would never have happened if I didn’t have access to SNES pirated games 20 years ago.

      I even got to make a game of my own now, which directly benefitted from piracy as well, as I noticed a bunch of people playing pirated versions on YouTube, with comments on those videos mentioning they liked it and bought it. My main concern related to piracy at that time was that those players were not getting bug fixes and new stuff I added to the game.

      In truth, there is no downside to piracy - it’s a net gain for everyone involved as long as the paying customers get to have a better, more comfortable experience with not having to deal with any hassle to consume your content. But if you make it harder for me to consume your content than the high seas does, well that’s on you.

    •  Artaca   ( @Artaca@lemdro.id ) English
      24•11 months ago

      Yup. Folks looking for stuff to be salty about. Those admins were protecting their hides and had every right to do so. Hosting carries risks. What could have been handled better was communicating this (a day or three beforehand + not on Discord lmao). The people acting like this is some sort of unforgivable problem are just being dorks. Don’t like it? Pop onto a new instance. It’s easy and is a perfect example as to why Lemmy is great.

      Edit: Worth mentioning that the piracy community is among the most active groups on the entire platform. As a viable alternative to reddit, I don’t think piracy being the face of Lemmy is a great look. Newcomers may start on LW and never need or want this community. Those who want it WILL find it.

      •  LakesLem   ( @LakesLem@lemm.ee ) English
        3•11 months ago

        Huh, wow, someone talking sense on the subject and not getting downvoted to oblivion.

        Some instances will be more averse to legal risk than others. Some will also lean more towards “censorship” (showing bigots the door) whilst others will be “free speech encouraged” (full of them). That’s the beauty of the fediverse. Pick your poison. Why go all pitchforks and DDOS attacks etc against an instance that doesn’t share your values when it’s piss easy to just switch to one that does?

        (I’m somewhere down the middle on the piracy subject. I believe in supporting small individual developers trying to feed their kids. But Adobe and the like can go fuck themselves)

    •  ParsnipWitch   ( @ParsnipWitch@feddit.de ) English
      7•11 months ago

      There was a short time at the beginning of the user influx on Lemmy were it actually felt friendly. Now everyone starts getting mad again. I think it’s in part because the critical mass of edgelords and otherwise hateful people has been reached. And it’s contagious or something.

        •  pinkdrunkenelephants   ( @pinkdrunkenelephants@sopuli.xyz ) English
          6•11 months ago

          A new federated platform that is self-run, hosts your identity only and allows you to interact from websites from your own app on your own phone or computer, to start. None of this signing up 500 trillion accounts for each and every website garbage.

          No more Lemmy instances hosting content from other servers. The content should be downloaded from the server you’re trying to interact with to the user’s system, and only what little content the user chooses to see, and is deleted like a cache as soon as the user closes it out.

          No more fucking downvoting 😠

          One account, one unique cryptographic identifier or ID tied to machines so people can’t make alt accounts or botnets

          There’s a LOT Lemmy and the fediverse as a whole needs to fix

            •  pinkdrunkenelephants   ( @pinkdrunkenelephants@sopuli.xyz ) English
              2•11 months ago

              That’s the whole problem. No one’s posts should be affected by the opinions of others and the fact that they are incentivizes all of the problems we are facing. People are making alts, brigadeering and building botnets to get around being downvoted and that breaks the system.

              Downvotes are not legitimate in any way at all except that they make people feel better and we can’t build a future based on such auspices.

              •  Armok: God of Blood   ( @ArmokGoB@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) English
                7•11 months ago

                The main issue is this:

                Say 1,000 people are arguing over an issue with 10 different sides, on a platform where you can upvote as many comments as you want. 250 people agree with one side, and the other nine sides have no more than 150 people in agreement. In this case, the comment arguing this side would have 250 points.

                Now, in a system without downvotes, this would rise to the top. However, say all 750 other people disagree with the side and can downvote it. In this case it would have -500 points. Let’s also say that the 250 people in agreement with this point also downvote all the other comments that disagree with them (in true Reddit fashion). The second most popular opinion would be sitting at -100 points. Basically, downvotes allow massively unpopular opinions to be shoved to the bottom.

                Bots and brigading are significant problems that need attention on platforms such as these, but removing downvotes isn’t the answer.

                •  pinkdrunkenelephants   ( @pinkdrunkenelephants@sopuli.xyz ) English
                  2•11 months ago

                  That presumes downvotes represent honest disagreement, which we both know and I have proven they don’t.

                  Because now one asshole with 500 different alts across the fediverse can take any post he wants and massively downvote it, enforcing consequential action against opinions he doesn’t like, and no one is the wiser.

                  That’s why we deal with the one having 250 upvotes, and give 500 upvotes to whoever disagrees with it, letting that opinion rise to the top instead.

          •  Catasaur   ( @Catasaur@lemmy.catasaur.xyz ) English
            3•11 months ago

            A new federated platform that is self-run, hosts your identity only and allows you to interact from websites from your own app on your own phone or computer, to start. None of this signing up 500 trillion accounts for each and every website garbage.

            But Lemmy can literally do this. I am doing it right now. I’m the only user on my instance.

  •  Gsus4   ( @Gsus4@feddit.nl ) English
    36•11 months ago

    Still, one of the key aspects of piracy is discreteness and these debates and notoriety don’t help with that. Piracy does not look for you, you look for it, if you know how to find out how. The last thing I want is for every single Lemmy thread about netflix to have a top comment saying piracy is better than streaming.

    •  uriel238   ( @uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) English
      10•11 months ago

      Intellectual property is denial of media rights to the public.

      Theft is justified in the face of capitalism.

      Those who live in precarity, poverty, homlessness or hunger are justified to do whatever violence is required to survive.

  •  Carion   ( @Carion@lemmy.antemeridiem.xyz ) English
    32•11 months ago

    Most pirates doesn’t use the product if pirated version isn’t avaliable, they aren’t a costumer, blocking piracy is actually a bad marketing decision, people can build hype even if they aren’t paying. No significant revenue is actually lost for piracy

    •  I Cast Fist   ( @ICastFist@programming.dev ) English
      6•11 months ago

      people can build hype even if they aren’t paying

      Historical examples: Windows and Photoshop, especially in countries outside G7. XP was probably the most pirated version of Windows and I wouldn’t be surprised if Photoshop was also the number 1 most pirated program during the mid-late 2000’s