Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Any instance in which I'm purchasing through a publisher or producer. Wherein I have no reasonable belief that my money is actually going to the people who developed the work.

Any Nintendo game.

I'd say as long as it isn't harming a small independent artist, then its generally ethical.

If you couldn't afford to pay for it in the first place, then they're not losing any money.

I look at it this way: A company's goal is to generate revenue from some product's sale. So, I could ask myself two questions regarding digital items:

Am I making money from the piracy of that product? Is this product something I would have otherwise purchased?

As I'm not making money from it and they are not being deprived revenue as I would not have bought it anyway, my actions are therefore ethical.

I've been listening to A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs and let me tell you, the music industry can fuck right off. Small indie label? I'll probably buy it, but one of the major record labels? Set sail mateys.

I expect to pay a fair price for things. Unfair pricing are profits made from monopolies which are illegal. Copyrights exist to enforce monopolies, and thus are unethical in my view. It is especially evil when lobbying pushes laws that develop mass surveillance, private militia and automatic justice. While these laws exist, piracy is an act of resistance against oppression.

And it must be mentioned : science should be free. Especially medical science.

What pisses me off with copyrights is that the unethical or outright evil behaviour come from the copyright owners, but they turned the laws so the evil behaviour is legal and we now have these questions about the ethic of so called piracy.

For me I have rules I set for myself when pirating, and generally try to reserve it for if it's something I'm unlikely to see or get otherwise (like how stuff is exclusive to a million different streaming services now, or older games that don't have an official re-release) or there's ethical reasons I don't want to support it (Like some EA stuff and Adobe, though so far the only [arguably] accessible PC games I've pirated are the Sims 3 and 4)

If it's indie stuff and [non-text]books I try to avoid it if possible.

Everything on a streaming service that attempts to limit password sharing. They made traveling with a streaming stick a completely unnecessary faff. Everytime I go to use a service they make me reverify the device multiple times a day. So, fuck you asshole now I'll stream your content for other sites and stop paying you!

When you have zero money

Perfectly ethical:

• Content that is Inaccessible legally such as old games, abandonware, delisted media, banned stuff etc.

• Digital copies of physical content you own

• Digital Content that you already own such as ebooks or movies, but are restricted access due to DRM or single-copy rules or other dumb stuff. If I paid for something I should have the right to access it however I want (as long as I don't distribute it)

Gray Area:

• Pirating work that benefits a publisher but not the creator. Movies, Shows, and Songs released by studios that exploited the creators of that material and not giving them a cent. This includes scientific work and research.

I wanted to watch the Clarkson-Hammond-May "Top Gear". Only on BBC iPlayer. Only in the UK.

The roundabout 22 series' and specials simply do not exist outside of that. What are you supposed to do? I would have paid the BBC, but they even discourage the use of VPN's themselves.

I'm not sure I can think of any examples of unethical piracy, except maybe bootlegging for sale as mentioned elsewhere.

I don't believe that piracy hurts anyone, so I can't understand any arguments that it's unethical.

Software wise, anything without a demo. The support from companies is dire at the best of times and if something doesn’t work on your system your screwed. In shops you can test the suitability of something by testing it (sitting on a couch, laying on a bed) but with software they take your money and run.

Also anything abandoned is fair game.

It's only ethical if you need the thing you're pirating, which doesn't apply to much. Pirate of you want, but look for ethics elsewhere.

Considering I'm pretty pisspoor at the moment everything is. And tbh if I had money I still wouldn't pay for movies but I would buy a lot on bandcamp(so I can make torrents out of it)

Paying for the product after viewing/using it if you like it or it's good.

I genuinely believe that stealing is stealing and anyone justifying it is doing so to not feel guilty about it.

I download things I haven't paid for. It's wrong. I can rationalize this because the stuff I'm stealing has already made their money and me enjoying it on my own time likely has zero impact on the content creators. Also, fuck the non-skippable intros and commercials on blurays.

The one exception to this, what I would argue is unquestionably "ethical piracy", is content that's actually important to the progress of humanity. Things like well researched scientific papers, studies about the humanities, psychology, the affects of technology, mechanization, artificial intelligence, etc. This should never be held behind lock and key. You whining about not having access to How I Met Your Mother is not a valid reason to steal content.

Also, people need to spend more time at their public libraries. If you want free shit, a lot of it is there explicitly for the purpose you all espouse.

When I don't want to give money to a specific company that I dislike. EA is an example.

If I’ve paid for it once, but the Powers That Be make it unavailable or want to charge again to continue using it, I have no problem with finding a copy that works to make my purchase whole.

Anything from Nintendo is fair game IMO.

Calling it ethical is a higher bar than calling it ethically acceptable. Ethically acceptable is a higher bar than practically acceptable.

If you are factually incapable of getting it otherwise, it is ethically acceptable. If, at the same time, you need the material, it is ethical.

Without the need and unavailability or unavailability, I would always be careful about calling it ethical - I would not call it ethical.

In those cases it is at least subjective and a weighing of various morals, costs, need or desire, and practicality. (By pirating you are a beneficiary without supporting the thing - which one should at least be aware of and weigh.)

If it is a product/software from a large company/corporation/organization that already has "fuck you" levels of money, then I feel it's way more than ethical since a few thousand people pirating their shit will absolutely not cause even the tiniest of cuts in their company for one, and because they treat their customers the same way an extreme germaphobe would treat the world record holder for dirtiest man in the world.

Same goes for any form of college/university textbooks.

Pirating anything from nintendo since they won’t release anything from the gamecube era and the new games never drop in price.

The one time I felt truly justified is when I bought quite a few vita games digitally and Sony took me not signing in for a few months as an excuse to wipe my account. They did email but I didn't see it until the account was gone.

So yeah hacked my Vita and downloaded everything I had owned and more.

It generally comes down to convenience of access mixed with some ethical consideration for me personally. Out of print books, textbooks, and history or research titles that are in the hundreds I’m simply not going to buy. I use JSTOR where I can, but will get academic research as I need if it’s not readily available. I tend not to pirate indie publishers for any media if I can help it. Sometimes I do to check it out before I purchase it. I try to support creators wherever I can, whenever I can. I like that options are available, and I don’t think anything should truly be off limits.

As long as you're not reselling or appropriating others' creations as your own, everything is ethical.

For me, I mostly rationalize my piracy as something generally unethical that I choose to partake in anyways. People often cite piracy as an issue with the service being provided, but there's just a lot of instances where I'd rather pirate something than pay for it, not because the service is bad, but because "Why pay for something when I can just get it free, eh?"

Though I think there is one specific case where I'd undoubtedly consider piracy ethical, which is for products that are not being sold on the market currently. Take a retro video game for instance. If it isn't being sold by any company, then there is no way to legally play the game apart from getting a secondhand copy. Either way, the company that owns the rights to it won't derive profit, and they aren't involved in secondhand markets whatsoever, so pirating the game effectively results in 0 negative consequences for any party, compared to legally acquiring it.

All piracy

When you are a student and cannot obtain a reasonably priced copy of software- as a company I would see this as a sure fire way to onboard a new generation into my product which will then be paid for with company money later on.

If the copyright holder no longer provides a legal way to acquire any piece of media directly from them, making it so that the only way to acquire it legally is in a manner that prevents the copyright holder from seeing any profit, and the legal option is essentially a grift where you’re sometimes paying 100x the sticker value for something where the copyright holder won’t see a single cent…