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Do you pirate?

  • Yes, always.

    Votes: 24 23.8%
  • No, never.

    Votes: 35 34.7%
  • Depends.

    Votes: 42 41.6%

  • Total voters
    101
I usually am against pirating, but if I am outside of the US, and there is no legal way to download or stream something that I want to see, I take that to mean the company doesn't want my money and I obtain it using other means. Basically if I go to a legal streaming site and I get the message that this content is not available in your region I read that as "pirate me"
 
This popped up on reddit a few months ago. Pretty much any would-be legitimate customer has been in this situation.
 

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My stance has not really changed, if pirating was impossible and I still wouldn't pay for something I may pirate it. if I would pay for it then I generally will. I basically abide by mill's no harm principle, my actions don't cause content creators to lose a penny but they occasionally benefit myself.

The only thing that's changed since I last chimed on on the subject on a similar thread (probably about 5 years ago) is that if I consider something unworthy of my money it's generally unworthy of my time. As such I don't pirate things nearly as much as I used to, I also pay for a lot more music as I have a lot of friends who produce music I adore and I'm happy to pay for it when I know all of the money goes directly to them.


I do however pirate a lot of stuff that we already own, it's ridiculous but ripping a DVD is a lot slower than just torrenting. Similarly it's faster to download an album than to find and rip our cd copy.
 
You don't want to pay for movies, music, or software. Okay, so go steal them. You're not going to get in trouble and it's a relatively small and inconsequential crime. But get off the high horse. You're *stealing*, not sticking it to the man or protesting against the excesses of big business. You're getting something for free because you can. There's no moral justification here, so stop groping for one.

This is 100% correct.......and I do pirate music.

If you're going to pirate/steal, at least own up to it. Like nastebu said, you're not "sticking it to the man", or getting revenge on large corporations for over-charging. You're stealing, and that makes things more expensive for people who actually purchase their products. That's it. There's no good justification for pirating software, and no justification for pirating movies or music if it's available at a store near you.

To be fair, I do have a minor justification for pirating music, and that is to "try before you buy". I do buy lots of music, but I admit to stealing it first. I ALWAYS pirate first, listen to it on my train-ride to work, and purchase later (if I like it). I don't purchase most of it, but only because I dislike most of it.
 
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If I pirate the full Adobe CS suite, then Adobe will probably say, "we're losing x amount". But reality is, I'd never buy it in the first place. I'm only using it because I got it for free. If I couldn't get it for free, then I'd use something else.

Same with a lot of artists. I would never have bought their album. But because it was free, I went ahead and downloaded it and ended up liking them. They played live in my area, and I ended up spending £20 to go see them live.

I think the whole industry for digital sales is screwed, and people are grasping onto a pre-internet era and trying to shoehorn that model into working now.

I have bought software - I bought VisualHub because it was cheap and I was using it everyday.

I know companies need to charge a lot of money for software because it covers the R&D, but how many people are going to shell out £1000 on a creative suite they use for a hobby?
 
Moot point. I work for a gym, but for argument sake let's pretend i work for a company that sells objects. It would be wrong to steal those objects because the company would have less objects to sell. The companies don't lose anything when i copy data, and i would have never paid for it anyway, so they can't count it as a loss.

Let's change the analogy then.

For every customer who purchases a gym membership, 10 get in free with memberships simply cloned from their member card.

How long before your paying members quit and go somewhere else because your gym Is too full?

Think you will have a job in a year?
 
The justifications for stealing here are quite literally frightening.

Please post your addresses, because I need a bunch of stuff and I think I should come to your houses and take it,

I would not buy any of this stuff for myself, but since you have it and I don't, I'm going to take it from you. You should all be ok with that, since I wasn't going to buy it anyway, right?
 
Well the gym already bought the equipment, and intends on paying rent regardless of whether I join or not, so they're not really losing anything.

Sure. The fact that they cannot pay their electric bill or their employees is no concern. After all the owner of the gym has lots of money.
 
Ah, a poll has been added. Seriously though, do you expect loads of people to answer it truthfully?

The justifications for stealing here are quite literally frightening.

Oh, sorry. Just close your eyes and pretend it's not happening.

Please post your addresses, because I need a bunch of stuff and I think I should come to your houses and take it,

I would not buy any of this stuff for myself, but since you have it and I don't, I'm going to take it from you. You should all be ok with that, since I wasn't going to buy it anyway, right?

I'm cool with that. I wish you luck trying to walk past security here though with my iMac...
 
Oh, sorry. Just close your eyes and pretend it's not happening.

Actually it helped me make a decision to add jail break detection to all of our apps and refuse to run. Since jail breaking enables piracy of iOS apps, we will make it just a little more painful to steal our stuff...
 
How long before your paying members quit and go somewhere else because your gym Is too full?

Still not the same an pirating software. If people have pirated gym memberships, we lose floor space and our paying members may have to wait on line to use a certain machine. When i pirate software, paying customers don't lose anything and aren't inconvenienced in anyway, other than the fact they had to get their wallet out and enter their credit card number and i skipped that step.
 
Having read this thread again, three things seem evident:

Some folks believe stealing is wrong.

Some folks, on the other hand, employ a myriad of rationalizations,and astoundingly and painfully twisted logic to justify that stealing is not REALLY stealing.

Some just don't give a ******, and call it what it is - they steal, call it stealing, and don't care if it's stealing.

All the rest is window dressing...
 
The justifications for stealing here are quite literally frightening.

Please post your addresses, because I need a bunch of stuff and I think I should come to your houses and take it,

I would not buy any of this stuff for myself, but since you have it and I don't, I'm going to take it from you. You should all be ok with that, since I wasn't going to buy it anyway, right?

Piracy is not stealing.

piracyisnottheft.jpg


Not saying that it's right but they are not the one and the same. Hence you going to someone's house and taking his possessions is not piracy, it's stealing.
 
Actually it helped me make a decision to add jail break detection to all of our apps and refuse to run. Since jail breaking enables piracy of iOS apps, we will make it just a little more painful to steal our stuff...

So after a jailbreaker buys your app you screw them by not allowing the app they paid for to run? So essentially you are stealing their money.
 
So after a jailbreaker buys your app you screw them by not allowing the app they paid for to run? So essentially you are stealing their money.

Not if they are aware of it, up front, unlike the vendor that gets ripped off.

No matter how you coat it, you are still depriving them of money.

These things don't R&D themselves.
 
Piracy is not stealing.

piracyisnottheft.jpg


Not saying that it's right but they are not the one and the same. Hence you going to someone's house and taking his possessions is not piracy, it's stealing.

That they're "not the same" is the result of laws creating legal definitions having been written long before the digital age rather than some ethical/moral decision having been made to exclude software piracy as "not the same"

Just because you illegally make a copy doesn't mean you now legally own that copy.

People pirate software because it's extremely easy to get away with. Then they offer all these justifications so they don't have to admit to themselves that they're doing something shady.
 
Not if they are aware of it, up front, unlike the vendor that gets ripped off.

No matter how you coat it, you are still depriving them of money.

These things don't R&D themselves.

How am I depriving "them" money if I am in the app store pressing the buy button? Because I jailbreak?

Do you know what a pain in the ass it is to run hacked apps?
 
How am I depriving "them" money if I am in the app store pressing the buy button? Because I jailbreak?

Do you know what a pain in the ass it is to run hacked apps?

When did we segue from theft/pirating to jail-breaking??

It's your ass, do with it as you please.

Maybe you will understand this point.

If a vendor doesn't have a poison pill in his product, he must include theft in his business model. This increases the cost of the product, for every legitimate buyer.

That's you and me, bub.
 
Actually it helped me make a decision to add jail break detection to all of our apps and refuse to run. Since jail breaking enables piracy of iOS apps, we will make it just a little more painful to steal our stuff...

When did we segue from theft/pirating to jail-breaking??

It's your ass, do with it as you please.

Maybe you will understand this point.

If a vendor doesn't have a poison pill in his product, he must include theft in his business model. This increases the cost of the product, for every legitimate buyer.

That's you and me, bub.

See thewitt comment for transformation to JB.

I see your point.

I down loaded well over 500 apps, probably used 30. When my wife and son got an iPhone all the apps were then purchased. in less than an our on iTunes had all the apps. All three phones were able to use them on their designated computers.
However I must admit that if it was just me, I would be walking around with my parrot on my shoulder and wearing an eye patch,
 
That they're "not the same" is the result of laws creating legal definitions having been written long before the digital age rather than some ethical/moral decision having been made to exclude software piracy as "not the same"

Just because you think they are the same doesn't mean that they are. Definitions are there for a reason. You don't call a theft a robbery, do you? If you see a kid taking a candy bar from a shop, you don't go out screaming that this kid just robbed the store. Definitions are needed to make languages possible in the first place.

When someone says piracy, you don't think about someone stealing a candy bar in a supermarket, do you? Likewise, when someone says theft, you don't think about someone illegally downloading music from the Internet, or do you?

They are similar, but not the same. Does it make piracy legal? Not at all.

Just because you illegally make a copy doesn't mean you now legally own that copy.

Where did I, or someone else, even claim that?

People pirate software because it's extremely easy to get away with. Then they offer all these justifications so they don't have to admit to themselves that they're doing something shady.

When did I say that piracy is okay and not shady? Just because I didn't join your "piracy is stealing" camp doesn't mean that I pirate and think it's legal.
 
I buy a boat load of CD's. However I have also aquired some music via the other methods also. Mainly for stuff that I can't get here in the states or if I could it would cost me a bloody fortune.

For some reason I have never gotten into the pirating of movies. Software either. I purchased all of that also. Mainly just hard to get cd's or stuff that is way to expensive in the stores. By expensive, $30-$60 range per cd, ouch. I have tons of box sets and compilations. I don't mind buying those.
 
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