this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Under Article 8 for Deezer's T&C's - https://www.deezer.com/legal/cgu
"Any use for a non-private purpose will expose the Subscriber to civil and/or criminal proceedings. Any other use of the Recordings is strictly forbidden and more particularly any download or attempt to download, any transfer or attempt to transfer permanently or temporarily on the hard drive of a computer or any other device (notably music players), any burn or attempt to burn a CD or any other support are expressly forbidden."
You're talking about ethical and unethical piracy. As far as the company whose product you're subscribing to is concerned, you are breaking the terms and conditions that you agreed to. To me, that sounds pretty unethical, but to you, it only makes sense that you should be able to freely download and store the content that you paid for.
There's no reason ToC has any correlation with an ethical framework, just like laws against gay marriage don't make gay marriage unethical. They're merely corporate decisions made by men in suits. Being ethical and being against ToC or against the law are nowhere near the same thing.
My ethical framework is about driving the world towards overall happiness of all people.
If I, instead of loading the file in FLAC 200 times from Deezer's servers, locally save it and replay it in my music player, all the while paying for the service so I could actually stream it 200 times if I wanted to - I don't see who's being hurt by this.
Does that make sense?
Now if the ToC says "don't do this, instead use our bandwidth as we want you to use it, but don't save our file" then instead of blindly accepting that, I read between the lines of why they don't want that.
Which seems fairly obvious: they want you to keep paying for the service monthly to keep your access to the content. And thus I keep paying monthly, as I have for years now.
If I stop paying and don't delete the content? Yes, then it does become unethical. I'm not planning to do that. But I'd still argue it's not nearly as unethical as using their servers without paying for access - because you're not inducing any costs for the company.
If your ethical framework is about "respecting corporate ToCs" yet don't mind making people use fake credit cards then I don't really know what to say anymore.