Once a pirate, always a pirate

I've been pirating since I was a child. That being said, I don't think it's particularly healthy to pin 'media pirating' as a personality trait.

If you have money to spend (and THAT much), you can still pirate, but if you pirate without trying to fund the source of your art and tools, you're a mega asshole. Especially if you have as much money as this dude claims to have. You can find the creators of your games online, find their ko-fis, their patreons. Where there's a will there's a way

Anon willl soon be 14 years old

If you have enough money to live comfortably, I think you should pay for art you love. That doesn't mean you shouldn't pirate anything (especially from big corps), but please donate some money to indie games, music, theatre...

My coworkers were talking today about all the hoops they were going through with streaming to find the content they wanted and navigating the byzantine extra charges to share it with their family. If piracy wasn't an option I still wouldn't go through all that, it's madness how much worse the paid service is to the high seas.

Aye, I used to sail the high seas, the hull of my ship gnarly with viruses, adware and malware from some infectious crackers or key-generators.

Then I had money, and started buying my software and my movies and all was good for a time. Then my media consume shifted to mobile devices, but I had Amazon Prime Video as the only really available video-streaming service around and all was good for a time. Then I added Netflix, as it arrived on my countries market and all was good for a time. Then I added Crunchyroll, Disney+ and Hulu and everything sucked, streaming the shows I wanted to watch was suddenly so expensive, no single streaming service had everything I wanted to watch, so I needed to subscribe to them all, costing an amount of money I would not spend on buying those shows.

Now I have unsubscribed from all but two again, but the market is so fractured, there is barely anything interesting on the services I still go to.

So my eyes keep wandering to that old tricorn, the hook and peg-leg, gathering dust on the wall. I can hear the waves crashing and feel the tide rising in my bones. The moneybags have decided to press us for more and more, their greed means no single harbor, not even two are enough to supply our demands. So there is plenty of bounty to be found on the high seas again, big fat galleons full of content otherwise unreachable or too expensive.

Doncha hear it boys? Davey Jones is singing again, calling us back to the sea, put on your VPN, defy the torrents and right your compasses with a good magnet. We did not choose this life, they made us turn to it.

if you have enough money, pay for stuff you like.

Cringe af

YTA

I'm heading back to it.

The streaming was sort of OK, and now it's wank. Spread across dozens of services, that don't have enough content to justify their existence. No UI linking them all together means you have no idea if something is available or not without checking justwatch.com

If music was like this, I'd pirate that too.

The hunt is part of the fun. Like how people will opt to build a PC or a keyboard over a pre-built or pull out vinyl over digital. The steps taken to retrieve and enjoy the media is sometimes a relaxing process.

I'm well over 25 years of sailing now (40 if you count games for early PCs), and they'll pry the sabre out of my cold, dead hands. I've made not watching ads a lifestyle and piracy is so much easier than dealing with the bullshit interfaces of streaming companies.

If I have a way of directly donating to creators and not via their shitty production companies, I'll take it. Podcasts have it right, I can send money to creators and get an ad-free stream. If I can't, I don't donate and I don't listen to their work.

In the end, me avoiding ads isn't costing anyone anything, because if I hear an ad, I likely avoid that product going forward. They have at best zero effect on my buying decisions, if not a negative one.

Pay it forward. I'm from 3rd world country. Growing up pirating gave me and my brother precious memories playing cs, doom, star wars, gta2, rollercoster tycoon, sims etc. Not to mention music and movies which would've cost us weeks of our food money if we would've bought it legitimately. We both grew up and made decent enough money now. I paid for my games and sometimes paid to play old games if i could find it in Steams. Million thanks to all the crackers, hosters, translators, modders, seeders, etc. You made my childhood memorable, and worth living despite all the shits going around us where we live. Oh not to mention i learned better english playing games than learning it from school.

I buy the things I want to support. Small game studios get my money. Bands get my money directly, I buy albums and merch. Pretty much, small businesses or organizations that put great amounts of care and love into their high quality work get my money all day, as directly as i can. But would I pay for an Activision/EA game? Or a Marvel movie? Absolutely not.

I've pirated almost everything for the last 30 years from msdos on. But I wouldn't say it's a lifestyle. It's just that most of the stuff I would never buy. I don't need them, they are not important, but maybe I want a taste. I don't pirate music anymore because it's not practical and some of the software. Some. Games I don't play much anymore, but I would pirate them until I have like 50 hours in. Then I start thinking maybe it makes sense to buy. Unless it turns out cracked version is better than official one.

I pirate a lot of stuff too but I prefer to buy stuff too sometimes just to provide support

I've been pirating for twenty years and you do kind of just stick with it even when you can afford stuff.

That said, when I reinstalled Windows a while ago, I was fannying about for aaaaaages trying to get a cracked version of Office to work when I suddenly realised I could just buy it for a tenner and not have to fuck about 😂 It hadn't occurred to me before

4chan and randomly using slurs for no reason

When i search roku for a movie made in 1969 and its $9.00 to rent or 15 to "buy" on their shitty platform......

Ahoy, matey

I mean, if you can afford it you should support industries. I pirate a lot. Movies. Games. Music. Etc. Nothing wrong with that IMO, at this point piracy is the closest we can get to true ownership over anything because the entire industry has f*cked over consumer rights for assumed profit. But I still buy physical releases because I don't want content I enjoy to die and I like building a collection of good content. Blurays are great (although also DRM encumbered :/), nothing beats the smell of new manga, and at this point music streaming is just a far better experience than piracy (I use qobuz). If you're young or poor then do what you have to to enjoy yourself. If you're an adult with a great salary then don't be an entitled prick. If theirs ways to support content you enjoy you should. If such ways aren't provided like most Netflix originals not having blurays then f*ck Netflix release some blurays if you want my money.

There're a couple of huge downsides (for me personally) to streaming services that just grinds with me:

• the quality is always worse than physical media, and
• scrobbing (moving back and forwards in the video, with the arrow keys or by moving the playback head) is almost never instantaneous, it usually requires a couple of seconds while the video rebuffers

Perhaps physical media is better these days (than DVDs were) for scrobbing, but then you have the FBI piracy messages to deal with. I've never owned a BluRay player, perhaps they're better?

But I know that sailing the high seas gets me a high-quality video, and I can jump backwards ~5 seconds instantaneously when I've not heard a bit a of dialogue.

Permanently Deleted

I will torrent the latest movie, but I will buy the latest album from my favorite band directly off Bandcamp. Might even buy a t-shirt or some stickers.

I don’t pirate games because Steam just makes it more convenient, and sites like IsThereAnyDeal make it easy to find sales.

However, as someone that’s been a hobbyist developer for 15 years, and never really been able to overcome the imposter syndrome to be able to publish anything, I’d be happy if someone thought my game was even worth the time to pirate, much less be paid for.

What a twat. Imagine your personality being you don't support creatives because you are addicted to stealing.

I think for movies and music this is totally true. Video games less so but not impossible

I can afford Crunchyroll at this point, but I still watch exclusively from Aniwave (formerly 9anime)

Piracy is whatever. Using an old school ass MP3 player in 2023 is unhinged though. I'm sure their phone can do whatever that MP3 player can do just as easily.

Or, pirate because it’s what Jesus would do.

Jesus 2024 gets sent straight to jail for just copy pasting everything for everybody, completely ruining the economy. You wouldn’t just download food for the hungry? Think about the corpo farms.

I pay for netflix, prime, disney+, paramount+, youtube premium, nebula, and a few more services. I buy music and movies, if available, on bluray and rip them to my own jellyfin server.

And yet, about 20% of what I watch, I've got to pirate because there's no reasonable way to actually watch it. Legal ways often only have the German dub, or are lower quality.

(When I was younger, my family was relatively poor, so back then I obviously pirated everything, but once I could afford it I wiped my entire collection and bought the exact same content properly again, for moral reasons obviously but also because I prefer to do rips myself so they've got proper quality).

The RIAA drove me to piracy in the early days.

Then stuff like Google Play music came along and I stopped because I can actually pay for basically any song I want to listen to, all at my fingertips and that is still true. It makes me happy to support the artists and their music though I know they don't get very much of the cut.

The MPAA was much of the same story.

Then Netflix happened and I was all set for the same thing to happen, but it didn't. Now streaming is almost as fractured as cable TV packages, and I went right back to piracy.

Screw it. I don't feel bad about it because they haven't shown any regard for the people they continually exploit, namely their customers. They don't give any shits if I financially sink while trying to afford to enjoy the things that they make, so I won't give any shits about their financial situation while I enjoy it anyways. Fuck them.

Ironically piracy actually costs more than streaming if you intend to preserve media.

From Limewire to QBitorrent, I've been sailing since I've had a computer.
It's crazy that people aren't aware of the alternatives out there, when all it takes is a little googling. But I guess that's just a sign that the likes of Netflix and Spotify have a stranglehold on mainstream consumers though

I personally don't believe in copyright. Nobody should be able to own an idea or data and be able to tell me what i can and cannot do with said 1s and 0s, which is what digital media is. I will find other ways to support artists and creators like going to concerts, donating or buying merchandise etc... You can't steal data because nobody owns it to begin with in my view.

Anything confidential should be kept encrypted or offline of course.

It just makes sense.

All I see is people putting on clown makeup when they try to defend paying for a profitable product they could otherwise get for free.

Mark Twain was right. It's easier to fool someone than to convince them they'd been fooled. This generation is full of proud idiots. It gives them a sense of belonging.

At least they're easy to take advantage of.

Just a few days ago I pulled an old Sony's NWZ player as they still have superior audio quality compared to phones. I had to throw it away after 10+ years as the battery died.

As long as a company is making a profit all costs have been covered, all employees, suppliers, and producers have been paid. Those in society who have the means and the will have ensured this product exists and has been paid for and I thank them for their contribution. That allows the rest of humanity to enjoy the socialisation of their contribution to the masses, who have not the means or the will, but who ensure the rest of the system is available and working to support everyone's ability to contribute.

If you want to argue that employees, suppliers, or producers aren't adequately paid, then why is there a profit margin?

The only "pirating" I do these days is using real debrid and I think that's the lightest pirating you can do since I since have to pay although an extremely small amount compared to a traditional streaming service.

I'll pirate anything except indie games. Gotta support the small devs

what website is that?

Once you go black flag you never look back

Anyone know what happened to the rarbgdotbest? It was a mirror for taken down rarbg, are there any others? I've tried rolling my own with docker but can't get it to work :/

YARRRRRR!!!!!

I would say with confidence that your knowledge in computers and solving problems contributed to your success.

I used to pirate movies but ever since torrent sites stopped working or started giving you .exe files, I stopped watching movies completely. Unless it's a movie on TV ofc.

That last line speaks volumes.

I thought we left the memes and greentext back on Reddit.

Cringe!

In this moment I am euphoric vibes.

Being a proud pirate is some of the dumbest shit on the planet.