Shaking the hornet's nest, piracy debate (not just games)

I pirated back in the day, either because I didn't have the money or whenever they would raise the prices on games and such, just trying to stick it to the greedy bastards, or to try a game out and maybe buy it later if it didn't have a demo. Most of the time now I just wait for a good sale.

Movies on the other hand, I will download because I can? I am not sure exactly why. Probably because it's way easier/faster than getting games.

Not really big on music. I just listen to Pandora if I'm in the mood or while driving.

I think its wrong and I shouldn't do it with software and such, but I justify it to myself because its not so different from someone lending me a book, or borrowing a video game. I just picture torrents as a giant lending library.

I pirated because I didn't had money and had too much free time.
Now I don't pirate because I have money and don't have enough time.

The main problem for me isn't anything else but pricing.

If you charge 60 USD for a game in my country it's way too much.

I use Steam but I pirate as well.

I think you mean "nest".

I try not to pirate. I, on occasion, download some animu or something, but honestly, I have such a huge games backlog I will never want for something to do. If I can buy something legally, I either do or I wait. If something is only licensed in another country and the imports are exorbitant, I might try to buy something from a international retailer, though whether I download depends on medium. I never pirate games, but I will stream music from youtube or a radio station or something and maybe download some of the best songs for offline listening if I need to. Otherwise, though, I only download animu because local distributions are terribad, super slow, and offer mediocre translations and somehow worse subs (I have to watch videos with subtitles because of my attention span, and sometimes they don't include any languages I don't speak so I start alt tabbing and then never watch the show). I always try to support the original developer if I can.

I pirate when getting a legit copy is beyond frustrating to get a hold of. This usually means obscure/niche stuff that most streaming services or retailers don't provide. For context, I have 3 different subs for shows/movies, with iTunes and Spotify for music. Never pirated games before and taking a look at my library will show that I probably never will :P.

Of course I used to pirate games as a kid. Of course, money was a big issue, but the other big issue that is rarely mentioned is that people don't realise how much work creators have put in and don't appreciate that. Often they will say "oh this game/movie/music/stuff is not really good, so they don't deserve money", which is really wrong.
On the money issue. Some countries do have problems. For example, 2 weeks ago I had to buy drugs (medicine, not cocaine). I paid 200 euro. The f*@ked up thing is that exact same drugs cost 50 euro in Poland. I paid 250 euro for rent. I earn ~350 euros a month. So it's already 100 euro more than I earn, and these costs don't even include food (which would be about 100 euro for 1 person, thank god I take food from my parents), internet, phone.. So if I don't even have money to buy food, what else is there to do? Look through the window?
However, I don't pirate games anymore because there are so many of them for affordable prices even for people living pretty much anywhere, lots of bundles for 1-5$, lots of giveaways, steam family sharing.
Music. I don't listen to popular music much, so the popular music I just listen on youtube. As for music I like, I listen to sets/mixes, which are free.
I still watch movies/shows online. Mainly because I pretty much often watch old stuff (couple of shows I'm currently watching episodes are 12 and 25 years old) and there's not Netflix or something like that in my country. And the other reason is that I don't go outside ^^

This is a large topic, but I will just say that the most significant problem I see with piracy is the attitude of entitlement and gradual decay of societal morals that it breeds. I can expound upon this point some more if anyone is interested in constructive discourse on the matter.

My problem comes from languages. I love English, and because I can understand almost all references, jokes, I prefer my movies and series in English - but in Hungary it's kind of hard to get these - no official streaming service, English only available on DVDs but unless you look after something quite popular, it's almost impossible to get.I would gladly pay 10-15$ for Netflix like other people do to watch what I want, when I want. But nupe... :\
Stopped torrenting games "in bulk" about 2 years ago, when realized how affordable games can be during sales / in bundles - previously I was terrified at the (overinflated) base prices. Nowadays I torrent only the unavailable, or really risky ones - checked on Gone Home, downloaded a huuuge DOS-game collection and Silent Hill 1-2 for emulator (still unplayed) - I think this is all :) Instead of torrenting a game I feel to be too expensive I wait it to become cheap enough to feel I still get my money's worth.

I never used to pirate anything. Then one day, whilst sitting on my porch watching the sunrise (with my trusty dog at my side), I had an epiphany.

"I would look really good with an eyepatch", I thought to myself. I wandered around WalMart for an hour, then several other merchants and shoppes, seeking an eyepatch to no avail. Every shoppe only carried a beige/brown eyepatch, and since it's winter, I needed darker colors (everyone knows earthtones are autumn colors). My search continued. I sought far and wide, from coast to coast, across the seas and continents, for just the right eyepatch to complete the look, until I ended up in Tortuga. There, not only did I find the eyepatch for which I sought so fervently, but I also met a man with a wooden leg. After downing many ales and singing loud raucous songs of cheap booze and loose women, he convinced me that everyone should have a wooden leg.

The next thing I know, we're out behind the tavern, and he's brandishing a very large woodcutter's axe ... off comes my leg. It hurt like hell at the time, but Jack and I have had several good laughs about the bloody stump since then. Besides, the mahogany replacement has a nice finish to it and the color really brings out my eyes. It makes stairs and escalators a bit more difficult to navigate, sure, and I'll never run a 5 minute mile again, but the trade-off seemed fair to me. People always stop and stare at the fellow who makes a resounding THUMP with every other step he takes.

Late one night later that year, I was stumbling along the beach (have you ever tried walking in sand with a wooden leg?! Then shut up!), when my eyes fell upon the most beautiful creation I'd ever seen. Sleekly and silenty moving through the water, her bosom high in the wind, a magnificent ship came into view. It was then I knew that I should have her as my own, and spend the rest of my days sailiing around the world, drinking rum and making my living off the misfortune of others.

View attached image.

i haven't pirated games in some time now but i hold nothing against people who do,there are many reasons to pirate besides price,some games come out half assed then they sell you a dozen expensive DLC's to make the game feel like it should have when it came out,others do the same thing with micro transactions making the game bland without dropping a bunch more money to get the full game,while others have such intrusive problematic DRM included that a pirated copy is actually better then the purchased game(think UPlay), i have actually used cracks from pirated games for games that i have payed for just so i would not have to deal with some of the DRM out there.

My reasoning for piracy is that certain companies; such as 2K, EA and WB, LOVE to mark up prices for us living in Australia and New Zealand. For example, X-COM: Enemy Unknown has a base price of $US 29.99 in the US, while Australians MUST pay $US 39.99, with a price increase of 33% compared to the US regional price. And that's for the exact product!

I wouldn't mind pirating that game, if I didn't own it. Also, EA's taking the piss by putting tonnes of DLC on their games, such as The Sims series. I wonder why Australia has a high piracy level. Don't you too?

I once believed that piracy was totally a Good Thing, as it greatly contributed to the Public Domain, which is a Good Thing. My view has since shifted (and still shifting) now that I started experimenting with treating IP as a social commons rather than as a private good (how the current legal order treats it) or a public good (the usual libertarian position). I'm still personally working through this but I think it's the correct way to understand it, with some interesting implications. It would suggest that piracy is not a problem per se, but instead a form of social parasitism. So it generates an opportunity cost, not a real one. As such it should be limited if it can't be refashioned into a productive tool, like how capitalism turns greed into an engine for social progress.

However I still contend that piracy is a necessary reaction to problems created by Leviathan. The current legal/economic framework around IP is a fucking fascistic joke. LOTR, Star Wars, and Super Mario Bros should all be public domain by now, but they won't be until 2044, 2072, and 2080. They have already become enmeshed in our cultural tapestry but they wont' stop being financially milked and denied its rightful place until after I'm likely dead, even when so much of our current culture has foundations on those works. So far piracy has kept deprecated titles from disappearing, provides a lever against anti-consumer bullshit, provides a necessary exposure outlet for non-mainstream artists, and financial relief in perpetually fucked up economies. Piracy is keeping human culture alive while Leviathan tries to replace it with its lowest-common-denominator pleb trash.

All i will say is not having access is still not an excuse to do it.

I get the reason why but none the less they do not make a valid reason to doing so.I do not have access to a lambo but i do not go out and steal one just because there are no dealers near me.Anyhow i am just saying you can make all the excuses or give all the reason in the world and still not going to convince me that it makes it alright.I do give credit to the OP for being honest.

Pirating something means that the creator if the product won't get the money he deserves from that sale, but if it's impossible to buy it then that sale doesn't really exist. Should you be denied the product because there is no way to make the purchase? Is it still wrong?

Yes it is still wrong,sadly you do not get to have access to that but that just the way life goes you can not always get everything you want.Just the same as poor people do not always have food or money does not mean it alright to take from someone who has it because they will not miss it.

my opinion is the only thing that gets a pass is the pirating of a product which is no longer available to easily purchase.. Although I can feel for the people who make next to nothing and have no other options... Then again if you can afford your computer.. why can't you afford the games you play on it..

I stopped pirating games some years ago, thanks to Steam and trading. But I have absolutely no problem with people who pirate games. There are lots of good reasons for it.

The game is not sold in your country? Why shouldn't you pirate then? This is a win/no-loss situation. You can't buy it anyway, so why not have fun with the pirated version.

Same goes for uncut versions of some games. I live in Germany, and in some cases we suffer from (completely unnecessary) region locks, which prevent us from playing the game, as it was meant to be played. Wolfenstein TNO is a good example. The Steam version cannot be played in Germany, if you don't use VPN. And as we all know, using a VPN to play games on Steam is not the best idea. So there is no way to play the game without breaking the law. I hope you see the irony there, because it would not have been against german law to allow the import of the cut version for German customers. All they had to do is to not sell the game in Germany. We could have bought it elsewhere, and everybody would have been happy. Instead they lock the game and sell a "German Edition" here, which is not only cut visually, but also offers german voice-over only. I play all games in english, and suddenly they force me to play theirs in german. Not cool. I didn't pirate the game (didn't pirate any game in a long time), but honestly - I should have.

Money is a very good reason. If you don't have the money to buy a game anyway, then why should you not pirate? People always say it's the same as stealing. It's not. They don't lose any sales. This goes not only for people in poor countries, students without income and whatnot, but also for people who have money, but play more games than their budget allows them to buy.

While I don't do it myself (anymore), I am perfectly fine with anyone who pirates games for those or other good reasons. The "lost sales" argument only works, if there would have been actual sales. And often this just isn't the case.

I don't pirate new games - I think it's just easier to buy them through steam, plus with the prices on sale they don't cost all that much. I do use emulators to play some Mega Drive games, though, and because they're not current I don't feel bad about it.

I never pirated music that much, tbh, just a track here and there, but I never do anymore - Spotify has changed the way I listen to music and when I really like a track/album/artist I'll either buy the cd or get it on Bandcamp/iTunes.

The only thing I really download these days is Game of Thrones, and I'd rather not to, to be honest. Where I live it's only available from one provider and I can't use that provider in my house (requires a satellite dish, banned in my complex). That same provider also has all the online rights in the region. I would happily pay ~€3 an episode to the Apple store/Google Play/Amazon Video if it was on them, but they're not allowed to stream it in my region because of licencing issues with the satellite provider. So in that case it's not that I don't want to pay to watch it, it's that I can't.

The root of piracy is the desire to take things without permission and lack of morals to stop it. Pirates have all sort of excuses (which vary in validity), but that's what it boils down to.

I'm not saying it's a huge crime or that it does major harm (or even minor harm in many cases), but it still boils down to this.

It's the price. I'd love to pay for games to support the developers, but when the new popular games cost 1/5 of my monthly income, sorry, I'll not starve to play it. I buy cheap games though, so I guess it's kind of fair, big companies sell lots of their expensive games anyway, and the living standard of their devs is way better than mine anyway, so I can't really feel guilty for pirating stuff. Stealing from the rich to give to the poor, you know.

Don't feel bad for being a pirate. If you're poor or you can't see a movie or play a game otherwise, then it's not bad to pirate. But if you were rich and you had cinemas and game stores, then why would you even pirate? xD

The root of piracy is that people want something, can get it for free with minimal effort, face few consequences for acquiring it for free, and cognitive biases both exploit our perspective on the issue as well as allow us to rationalize the behavior. This is the reality of the digital area and the decline of physical media.

That's all.

Other factors--such as an industry that is poor at digital distribution (whether it be incompetence or greed), or end-users with a sense of entitlement--are secondary or tertiary. That's not to say other factors aren't variable depending upon the situation and/or industry.

I'm a New Yorker, and looots of people here buy DVD movies on the street for as little as a $1. That industry has been here for quite some time (as depicted in an episode of "Seinfeld")--since back in the audio and video cassette days at least. You may even find a bootleg DVD playing in a doctor's waiting room, or at a function or activity for children organized or supervised by municipal employees. People don't think of it as "wrong", it's convenient even for someone who can barely do a Google search, it's inexpensive, and there are no consequences.

Other factors matter, but not as much as most people think. It's easy to try to point out that many industries "overcharge" for their media but the reality is that so long as a viable consumer option is to pay little or nothing for media it's difficult for the industry to find an appropriate and fair price point, since a proper model of the market doesn't include competing against a vastly cheaper (though not necessarily inferior) version of your own product.