Basically: should i care about ethics?
I am just going to buy from the actual bands when I buy music. If they do not have DIY from now on, I will just listen to something else. There are plenty of bands that do their own production.
Ef ethics in a world where greed is the norm imho.
IMO support indie creators when you can. Aside from that, ahoy!
Basically: should i care about
ethicscapitalist ideology?No.
The system is literally genociding people, destroying the planet, etc. It’s a major mistake to take their “ethics” seriously. It’s just another grift. Enjoy the natural freedom of information while you still can.
this
This, but at the same time, support the people whose work you like so they can continue doing it.
Hell yeah. I give money to small/individual artists and creators when I can be guaranteed they’re getting all my money. Everything else is fair game for me and I’ve never felt a bit of shame.
Where is the threshold between supporting “the little guy” to “supporting evil capitalism”? At some point the little guy you support with money might become a super star. You still like his art but would you still support?
I do the same btw but this question creates cognitive dissonance in my small tiny brain.
I don’t think there is a clear line there. Avoiding the big names we all know about is a start, and then we all do the best we can.
The difference is how much money they’re making and how they’re spending it.
For pretty much all creators bitching about not getting paid enough, it’s so they can live lavish lifestyles without having to think about what they spend their money on.
This
Do what your ethics dictates. There is no right or wrong answers.
Support the creators who deserve support. Otherwise you will end up with nothing good to pirate, because all the creators who deserved support and made your favourite creations, starved to death (or got other jobs, effectively the same thing)
Your single act of piracy is not likely to make a difference either way, but on the other hand, your single act might indeed be the straw that breaks one particular camel’s back. And collectively we have to take some responsibility for that. It’s not even just about ethics (although it is ALSO about ethics), it’s about self-interest. You can be an individual freerider if you want, but eventually the freeriders overwhelm the system and it shuts down.
Realistically there will always be plenty, plenty of games to pirate. But the key question is, will enough of those be good games, the really enjoyable ones that you want to play? The AAA slop and rehashes will never stop, oh they’'ll churn and froth and lay people off and blame pirates but they’re effectively self-sustaining, it takes money to make money and it takes money to lose money and there’s enough money in the system to keep them churning out sequels and derivative “new IP” until the heath death of the universe. There will always be some good games to pirate and to play no matter what you do, no matter what we all do.
But it’s not a binary condition whether our financial support or piracy matters. You vote with your dollars. Your dollars guide the AAA studios in their desperate chase to steal the dollars from us, and your dollars literally enable indie developers to continue their projects at all. If too many people are not rewarding the kinds of novel and well-made games they want to see from AAA studios, and not supporting people’s passion projects that they’ve poured years of their lives into, you’re not going to see as many novel and well-made games or passion projects like that happening, and odds are good that at least one of the ones you won’t see happening will be one you really would have enjoyed.
Best answer. Definitely support those who deserve it!
Technically you rented that what you think you bought and when the licence expires the game,movie, etc. will be deleted from your library, best recent example is The Crew by Ubisoft and there was that whole debacle with Sony and their Discovery Channel licence where people lost a ton of documentaries, was later restored… mostly, but it showed how fragile this digital ecosystem is and why people turn to piracy eventually since you basically don’t own anything you shouldn’t feel guilty about it.
Fr tho basically what /u/AnimalsDream said
fr fr, I’d shoplift too if it weren’t that easy to get caught
For the authorities: Definitely not the second.
Do whatever you want I personally live in iran and I have a 160$ salary previously 300$ but snapback mechanism sanctions something something and 2 AAA games are 160$, also do not buy from key selling websites that harms the developers but piracy doesn’t its the same as nobody buying
You wouldn’t steal a salary
The US Supreme Court said it’s cool for LLMs to pirate shit for their garbage so it’s free game. Pirate everything. Support indie developers and artists though if you dug some of the stuff you pirated and have the means. I pirate manga all the time but still like having a lot of the physical copies so I end up doing that a lot even though they’re usually raking in money
Pirate anything you want, and buy from anyone you want to support.
You should only feel bad about pirating art made by small independent artists, and even then only if you don’t have the disposable income to easily afford it.
Piracy is an actually victimless crime, you aren’t depriving anyone of anything except your hypothetical dollars. And that’s only a loss if you were going to spend them in the first place. Then add the fact that selling digital goods at all is basically a massive scam…
Also, in many cases it’s actually better for the artist to donate directly to them than to buy their products from a store that’s probably taking a cut.
I used to only pirate things that I owned in different formats, (like owning a DVD, but wanting to watch it on my iPad), or planned on buying in the near future. But nowadays, it feels more like stealing from billionaires is a moral imperative.
preach.
As I’ve made more money in life, I pirate the same amount of stuff, basically (besides games). But I also spend a shitload of money on the stuff I like. Instead of paying Netflix or Spotify, I buy DVD/BD box sets, collector’s editions, vinyl, bandcamp my favorite albums, and way too many concert tickets. Avoid the middleman and support the creator.
besides games
Yeah, same here. I haven’t pirated games since I was a broke university student. There’s simply no need to when digital storefronts make it easy to get the games I want in the format I want. Some even offer DRM-free offline backups, or in the case of Steam the games stay in my library even if the publisher decides to remove the title from the Steam storefront.
TV and movies are completely different from this, and so much worse. So many different streaming services, some with intrusive ads, and every one wanting their own monthly subscription. I shouldn’t need to search “where is X streaming.” Ever. Titles disappear from these services all the time. Even if you “buy” a digital movie or show, the rights holder can yank it back from you because… reasons?
TV and movie distribution is such a garbage deal for consumers that open source developers have created a complete software stack (the servarr stack) to automate the process of finding and downloading media. Once you get it set up, it’s about million times more convenient than corporate streaming services.
TL;DR: Getting digital games is easy and feels like a fair deal for the average consumer. Getting movies and TV shows is a pain in the ass and feels like an absolute shit deal for the consumer. I’ll continue to pirate movies and TV shows because as Gabe Newell famously argued, piracy indicates a service problem.
You’ve conflated laws and ethics. Does piracy violate some laws in some jurisdictions? Unquestionably. Is every single law ethical? Unlikely.
