this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2024
1365 points (95.6% liked)
memes
10322 readers
1975 users here now
Community rules
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.
Sister communities
- !tenforward@lemmy.world : Star Trek memes, chat and shitposts
- !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world : Lemmy Shitposts, anything and everything goes.
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world : Linux themed memes
- !comicstrips@lemmy.world : for those who love comic stories.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I don't see how piracy hurts anyone.
Some pirates just want a free demo before they buy it, others pirate stuff they already bought for convenience reasons, or decide to pay for a license if they like it and want to support the creators, and the third type of pirate never would've bought anything to begin with, so no lost sales in any conceivable way.
So it doesn't hurt the content creator because a minority of pirates actually compensate them for their work?
If piracy didn't exist at all the "never would've bought it" people wouldn't have a choice but to compensate the content creators in order to enjoy their work. They probably wouldn't buy all the content that they consume at the moment and would instead be playing less games or watching less movies, but they would still be doing something with their free time and money and it would profit others (and potentially themselves).
Those are valid points, I agree.
I think we have to get to the bottom of why people pirate things. Some just don't give a fuck and want everything for free, even though they could afford it. Being pissed at those people as a content creator is perfectly understandable, everyone should be fairly compensated for their work.
It's just that when companies do their best to make being a legitimate buyer an objectively bad experience, that's a point where I'm not opposed to piracy at all. Adobe comes to mind. Fuck those guys, they just ruin everything.
But if we look at video games, Steam has become so nice over the years that many people rather buy there than to pirate, which says a lot.
Do you know any platform that only offers digital stuff that's not buyable in a "good" way? Because I don't. That pirates pretend to ride some moral high horse is a cope that's incredibly disrespectful towards creators.
I feel in online communities like the Fediverse there is an active community of people who do not respect work of people who aren't working in tech or science. Or maybe it's predominantly a disrespect for creatives? I see this in discussions about AI image generators as well. And it's basically the same set of arguments that try to suggest artist should work for free.
They just have to add "get a real job and do your hobbies in your free time" and we have full circled back into the boomer mindset.
I'm gonna draw a hard line though, one between individual creators who do honest and fair work, and big corporations that exploit anyone who wants or needs to aquire their products legitimately.
Because legal or not, what some companies are doing is just completely fucked. Again, Adobe.