If buying isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t stealing.

Pirate what you need unless you are one of them archiver preppers.

This ain’t about “legality” this is about fighting the class war against owner class.

Do what you want. No need to overthink things!

I like to think about ethics. I still pirate some random stuff here and there, but one thing I like to do is make sure I’m getting some money to the creators of what I’m enjoying, skipping the middle man as much as can be.

this is mostly only relevant with music, but if I can buy an album or song directly from the artist, that’s awesome. it not, i try to five what service benefits them most.

do whatever you like nobody cares (no offense)

No need to make everything complicated

Basically: should i care about ethics capitalist 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.

Fr tho basically what /u/AnimalsDream said

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.

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

Do what your ethics dictates. There is no right or wrong answers.

Ha ha. I got your mass produced shit and i didnt pay for it, and then shared it with people so they dont waste their money.

And

Oh hey wanna buy that bluray for Toxic Avenger cause its a great movie?

Are 2 thoughts im completely fine with holding in my head.

From my personal ethics standpoint, intellectual property is a form of private property which I’m against, also a form or artificial scarcity, which I’m also against.

If you want to support a small artist? You can maybe donate to them directly? Is that a thing? Maybe they have a patreon or something? In my case I have way less money than the artists I consume from so donating would make no sense.

Also, the act of making a copy doesn’t remove the original, the artist doesn’t get poorer because you pirate their content.

Pirate anything you want, and buy from anyone you want to support.

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.

it depends.

I’m old enough to remember when PC demos were a thing and essentially if a demo didn’t exist, the game likely wouldn’t sell well. Hell there used to be entire websites that ONLY had demos for download of upcoming releases. So now game companies don’t do demos anymore, I pirate the games as a demo. If it’s something I think I’ll play through and come back to in a month or two or even a year then I’ll buy it. If it’s an indie dev I’ll buy it because I want to support them.

If it’s something I’m no likely to finish or will finish and never pick it up again, high seas.

Music is different. I just soulseek everything. I’m not paying some crappy streaming service to then provide pennies to the artist. I can support artists I like via other means. Merch sales, going to concerts, etc that’s where they get their money.

TV and movies? fuck em. I’m not paying for that crap when 9 times out of 10 something that I like is just going to get cancelled after 2 seasons. They don’t need my money.

Books? nope, always pay for those.