More crime is committed in the making of media than in pirating it.
Also more wrongdoing against society and the public that the justice department couldn’t be bothered with (so doesn’t count as crime).
Pirate it all or don’t watch it.
Note that with rare exceptions, creators are not supported by your purchases. Rather the studios, labels and publishers wh cheat creators are.
If you want to support the creators, pay them directly, or go to one of their performances / signings / functions. But still pirate their work.
Public domain and abandonware and forgotten media are regarded by the media companies as a threat to their business model, since it is possible you can be entertained by them rather than their own for-cost offerings. It is no longer enough for them to control what you consume media, but insist on controlling whether you consume.
And the courts regard them as persons and members of the public as not. We don’t count as invested parties.
According to the US and the EU we common folk don’t figure.
It is now more ethical to pirate (or simply not consume it at all) than it is to obtain legitimate licenses.
Since the publishers are also trying to suppress out-of-print media, abandonware and public domain material (also fair use) and the courts are favoring the publishers over the good of the public, we know it’s no longer about promoting science and useful arts or building a robust public domain.
The companies and courts alike are breaking the social contract, hence the trmporary monopolies enstated by the agencies of the same state are invalid. Piracy is no longer a valid crime since the state licenses are no longer valid.
(They will still enforce the will of the state — ICE does a lot of raids to enforce commercial interests when it’s not massacring refugees— but that doesn’t legitimize the will of the state. It only shows they are willing tyrants glad to use violence to oppress.)
We have nothing to lose but our chains!
Unhiding extensions is one of the first things I do when setting up windows, but it will still hide the .lnk extension on shortcuts, so it’s still a vector for phishing attacks (specifically, tricking the user to do something that runs malicious code).
Experienced pirates will get into the habit of taking precautions against malware attacks and will distrust downloads until they are sufficiently vetted,
That’s okay. Countless musicians lost their jobs with talkies and the rise of recording.
ETA I’d rather see recording industry moguls lose their job from obsolescence than actual musicians.
Please do.
I’m glad to not watch content that is enshittified by ads… or is enshittified by poor development.
Death to IP. Full stop.
Actually it does. It involves making use of a copy that is not the original. Fair use is about experiencing media for sake of dialog (criticism or parody) or for edification. That means someone is reading the book or watching the movie, or using it for transformative art or science.
AI training should qualify for fair use.
Cranky enough to demand satisfaction (in the courts if not the dueling field), but no one in the company will think their own ire warrants empathy for those from whom they pirate.
It’s even more okay when the bourgeoisie does it in the interest of potential profit gain.
One can only hope. Copyright has, for a long time been wrongdoing against the public by denying it a robust public domain. We should have free access to ideas less than a century old.
This reveals, nonetheless, even European government is about control, not governance, enforcement of established hierarchy, not civil rights for all.
Here in the US, there are no progressive legislative bodies. The Democratic party treats its progressive members as the red-haired stepchildren who have to dine at their own table.
Here.. Article I, Section 8, Clause 8.
[the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
The whole point of IP laws (according to the Constitution of the United States) is to develop a robust public domain. Every registered idea, multiplied by every limited rights extention is a violation of public interest and public rights.
By burying or failing to preserve content, they are in fact stealing from the public, since we won’t be able to access it when it is our right.
Media piracy is in the tradition of oyster piracy (stealing from landlords trying to control the oyster market) and the golden age (robbing the Spanish silver train that was exploiting the nations of the new world) in that it’s crime against unreasonable state regimes.
This is not to say underground media sharing has always had the moral high-ground, and it’s not even to say that fair copyright laws are unreasonable, but since the mid 20th century (since Disney, essentially) intellectual property law has not served the public in a community effort to build a robust public domain of ideas and content, rather has been used to do the opposite, to favor established businesses over new ones with complete disregard for the public.
But then there’s the technological matter, where DRM is used to obstruct of sharing (reasonable or otherwise, legal or otherwise). Here in the states it’s legal to use DRM to obstruct legal backups and sharing, but it’s not legal to bypass DRM to facilitate legal backups and sharing. It shows us that our regulatory agencies are captured, that our government serves rich companies and plutocrats rather than the public. The law runs contrary to the social contract.
We are in an age in which our language (English) only has words for wrongdoing that acknowledges two authorities: Sin (wrongness against the Church – allegedly against God) and Crime (wrongness against the state, in accordance to what laws are enforced by a legal system). When we talk about other entities that can be wrong, say, individuals, the community, the world population, ecosystems outside of human society, we have to make do with the words we have, e.g. sin against nature, crimes against humanity, and so on.
Intellectual property law is a construct that (according to the Constitution of the United States) was intended to do a thing that it has totally failed at, going as far as creating perverse incentives to misuse the law. And given the companies that produce the media we might pirate are poor at compensating artists and developers, or at recognizing licenses already established (say, your DVD copy of Ghostbusters when the new medium emerges), given they pirate each other’s content shamelessly, and will steal yours outright if you can’t outspend them in court, it has actually become more ethical to pirate content than to buy it legitimately.
But I’d teach my kids not just to pirate, but to recognize shoddy work from good work, and to not consume at all when they can, since consuming content benefits its producers, whether or not it’s acquired legally. (The MCU is about hero-team organizations who defend the status quo from all enemies, including the far left, and including those who want the human species to have a future. So they’re not really our heroes, are they? Batman runs around and beats up poor people, leaving the wealthy to continue to rule over the rest of us whose last resort is crime.
If we’re going to consume content, let’s use it to inspire the content we make ourselves, until commercial content is entirely unwanted and unnecessary. This is the future the MPAA and RIAA fear. Not everyone pirating their stuff, but everyone not bothered to pirate their stuff.
Edit: Clarification
They’re spoiled from selling you the same movies over and over again whenever a new medium becomes normalized, despite all your previous licenses. Then they complain when your media breaks or you want to share with your best friend.
They want your money for not doing anything new.
Now you know corporations and government departments will lie to children to benefit the ownership class and harm the labor class.
Let your kids know who authorities really work for, to question everything.
Heck, let the grown-ups know too. Many didn’t get the memo.
When I was able to seed relentlessly, I aimed for 3.0. Typically, popular things got into the tens or twenties, while rare stuff would get lucky to cross the 1.0 threshold.
Thieves and beggars, never shall we die and all that.
Clarification: The Mouse as in Disney Corporation not as in the thing you use to move your pointer.