It's like an evil for an evil. Robbing a rich man to buy your kids the latest shoes. It is tending towards robin hood but it's not yet in the "to buy foods to survive" category where the moral argument is better defined.

It is wild how many things I have discovered through piracy but eventually spent a boatload of money on. Music piracy in particular has been like free advertising ime.

I would get the free, cloned, indistinguishable bananas from the dodgy guy in the alley beside the supermarket.

No. Because pirating media is no where equivalent to stealing bananas.

Stealing a banana deprives the store of the banana and the revenue from the sale of the banana.

Pirating media does not deprive anyone of anything. And no, pirated media does not equal lost sale. It does not remove the media from the streaming site nor does it prevent the streaming site from profiting from the piece of media.

People need to stop making this analogy as is does not work for digital media.

When you read a free book at the public library instead of paying the publisher for it, are you stealing?

Your taxes fund the library and the expenses necessary to loan you the book. You need a library card before they'll loan you the book which is given out only to people who pay taxes in that district. The card is your authorization just like a license for software or other copyrighted works.

If I, a stranger, took your car out of your driveway without permission, is it stealing if I promised to return it?

If I, a stranger, made an exact copy of your car in your driveway without permission, is it stealing at all?

I'm not really sure where you're going with the "is it stealing if I take your car without permission" line, I don't think it really works here (or maybe I'm missing what you're meaning here).

A good example of where the lines of "stealing" are blurry could be this: A friend of yours has a login to Amazon Prime, and gives you the login credentials, which let you watch a show you would have otherwise had to pay for or somehow acquire. Is this stealing? Similarly, if you go to a public library in a city you don't live in, with a card of a friend's, and check out a book, is it stealing?

> Should we not have to pay for that either?

We should. Also The Software should be Free to copy, modify, sell the changes, use it however we like and give the same rights to others!

Pirating media is not stealing.

To your edit, I’m not claiming that piracy is good or a moral right. Nor am I claiming that it is legal.

Yes. People should pay for both software and media. But piracy is not stealing regardless.

> elsewhere, or not eating bananas.

if you could copy bananas without effort you would get rid of the hunger across the World and then get the Nobel Peace Prize

If someone takes a banana, that's less bananas for the next person who comes along.

If someone takes a movie or show episode, there's plenty for anyone who comes after them.

Meanwhile, if the store starts running a scam after ruining the market for bananas, yeah -they fucked me over so fuck them too.

I don’t. I know there are things that people expect me to pay money for and I feel bad about taking things that I know I shouldn’t.

And I don’t subscribe to the “but my HTTP requests” rationalization that’s so common here on HN.

> I know there are things that people expect me to pay money for

If the deal is I give the seller money and get the product, that's fine. But if next month the seller says actually now even though you're paying me I'm going to show you ads anyways, or yeah you gave me money but I've decided to take back the product without refunding you[0]... it is easy to become sympathetic to pirates.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/12/playstation-is-erasi...

What about things that aren't even available anymore any way but 'pirating'? I can think of two movies in recent times that just don't exist to rent or buy from any service, likely due to disputes of some nature.

> What about things that aren't even available anymore any way but 'pirating'?

This isn’t as tricky as you think it is!

You don’t watch, read, listen to, play, etc. those things.

So you let some corpo decide what you're allowed to watch or read?

I used to take the "this content is not available in your region" when trying to buy a kindle book as an excuse to pirate. If they don't want my money, they clearly don't care.

Now I stopped caring altogether though.

No, I decide what I watch and read.

There’s plenty of things to watch and read. If something isn’t available legally to me, I’ll find something else.

Out of personal curiosity, how far does this go for you? Would you download (without paying for)

- an old film (the Maltese Falcon, Wizard of Oz, Wings [1927 silent film])

- a really bad film (Santa Claus Conquers the Martians)

- something you already own but don't have access to at the moment

- anime

- none of the above?

None of the above.

If I want to watch an old film, a bad film, or an old bad film, I pay for it or I don’t watch it.

I’ve bought films on Amazon rather than get off my butt to put the DVD in the player. So you can guess that if I don’t have access to it at the moment that I’ll pay for it. I bought the DVD, I didn’t buy the right to download the movie (unless it was one of those DVDs with a download code included).

I have 0 interest in anime.

Thanks for taking the time to reply and satisfy my mostly aimless curiosity. As mentioned in a sibling, I probably should have gone with "cartoons" or "drivel" or similar for that category, but "anime" is my particular bias for that category of time waster

When buying isnt owning, then piracy is ethical.

Its gone too fucking long towards extreme copyright and gimmee programs like the DMCA. Piracy is that counteracting force.

Pirate it all. No other lever can make these companies correct.

>- anime

Are you expecting they might have some beef with Japan in particular?

Perhaps I should have generalized to "cartoons", or whatever watch-once fluff you might spend an hour or four a week on.

Wait until you're 90% through a TV show and your streaming provider removes it from their catalogue.

Would you buy the DVD boxset or perhaps the final season?

Or maybe download the last few episodes?

>Wait until you're 90% through a TV show and your streaming provider removes it from their catalogue.

Or Sony just steals it from you.

I mean I don’t get that worked up over those things.

I would just buy the DVD if I really wanted to see it. I wouldn’t download the last few episodes.

> I know there are things that people expect me to pay money for and I feel bad about taking things that I know I shouldn’t.

I used to think kind of like this, but came to the realization that it doesn't matter, at least for movies. First, it's not "people" that expect you to pay for it, it's corporations, and they don't really make money from you directly; if you pirated a movie instead of buying it, it really makes no difference, because either they came out in the cinema and the companies expect to make as much money as possible from the cinema ticket sales, or it came out on streaming which has a really muddy economic calculation. It's much different than, for example, a band's album on Bandcamp or a short film on Vimeo. Second, you're not even really "taking" something in the sense that you're not depriving someone else of the thing you have now, because it's digital, unlike if you stole a Blu-ray from someone's home or off of a shelf. Thirdly, sometimes it's legitimately not possible to get certain media other than pirating. There are multiple movies that I've wanted to watch and pay for but couldn't because of rights issues, and in those situations I'd have no option but to pirate or ask a friend to "get" me a copy.

Essentially, if it's a small artist or filmmaker, support them directly, and if you want to see a movie, go to the cinema to watch it if you can. Shows might be a different matter, but I also think they fall under the same "streaming economics" model where the pirate makes little/no difference in reality and you often can't even pay for the show individually if you wanted to.