what ‘level of piracy’ is morally or ethically acceptable to you?

If I could, I would download a car.

Setting legality aside, what 'level of piracy' is morally or ethically acceptable to you?

All levels. I think that human beings are morally and ethically obligated to do anything that causes a corporation to lose or miss out on profits. They exploit and disrespect our power as consumers by changing EULA after we purchase products, I see no reason not to rob these mfs blind.

If it's an indie game I'll pay for it after pirating, if I enjoy the game.

Where's the "Rent is 60% of my monthly wage, so I can't afford a 120 euro game."

I pirate be because I don't have money, that's why.

Do what you want 'cause a pirate is free

I pirate because I want free shit

Rank 16: Pirating because I grew up with low access and got used to it.

Now I have enough money to buy things, but it's no fun. I like the challenge of finding something for free, it feels like cheating capitalism.

Here's a rough summary of my philosophy:

1. Intellectual property as it is typically defined and legally defended is a self-contradictory concept.

2. IP in an ideal world would protect creators from fraud, (others falsely claiming credit for their work.) And would ensure fair payment distribution to the artist and workers directly involved, (not allow giant multi-billion dollar corpos to control and profit off massive swaths of IP).

3. You always have the right to do with your copy of media, whatever you want. Remix, trade, critique, promote, copy, etc.

4. It is always preferable to pirate vs funding corpos.

5. Pay for products that respect you, don't pay to be abused or to help abuse others.

I always try to pay the artist and those actually involved directly.

As for the sound techs, producers, etc that work on a project, most of them are already receiving a salary/wages for their time. So I disagree with Louis that pirating media generally hurts those folks.

The artist usually has some conditional debt where the record label requires them to cover some portion of the production costs from sales before they start actually making money. This is frequently a very exploitative arrangement that favors the studio and label. (See points 4 & 5)

There is no perfect solution. If the artist is small enough, direct sales of merch and media is the best option. This is what I try to do as much as possible.

I think another point is that art is fundamentally not a commodity, or at least, shouldn't be treated as such. Capitalism corrupts everything it touches, art is no exception. Artists who are truly passionate about their craft will create no matter what, as evidenced by the far larger portion of "starving" artists in the world vs wealthy ones.

I hate that music, film, paintings, and such are now treated as portfolios of investments by billion dollar corpos and rich fat cats who don't give a shit about the purpose of art and just want to get rich.

Pay for products and services that respect you. Don't pay to support abusive and exploitative industries if you can avoid it. Support genuine artists. Everything will always be fuzzy, make your best call. Copying is not theft. Corpos are scum.

I pirate because I dont earn my wage in dollaridoos, and I believe information and culture is a human right that shoudln't have any impact on me being able to pay my bills.

If I can, and want, I'll pay. Other than that big corporations that boasts about record sales every year could cry some more about me downloading an .iso for all I care.

I pirate because I’m broke, and when I’m not broke I pirate because I want to test before buying, or because fuck this company in particular (like with Disco Elysium or anything EA)

If you’ve got the means to pay for media and the company or person that produced it isn’t awful, you should probably purchase it. But I don’t particularly care either way, do what you want

I wish to live in a society in which this question is a moot point. Creators should have the freedom to create without having to worry about the goodwill of their audience, or worse, marketing strategies. Fans should have the freedom to access art without having to worry about the well-being of the creator, or worse, suffering guilt. Anything that is not aimed at creating and maintaining this state of being is inhumane.

I refuse to pay for pirated content out of principal. It's bad enough that I'm infringing copyright (and boy do I!) but commercialized piracy rubs me the wrong way. I even prefer Bittorrent over Usenet and FOSS media software over commercial software. Yarr!

Ranks 1 through 9 Is Not Piracy as you've paid for your copy in some manner typically. Rank 11 & 12 is not piracy

Ranks 10, 13, and 14 are JUSTIFIABLE Piracy. You are free to debate the merits of doing these things or choose not to do them yourself.

Rank 15 is blatant piracy and is arguably socially unacceptable and fully subject to full penalty of law. Don't be that guy!

My ethics are simple; You must fulfill one of two conditions:

1. You pay for a legitimate copy (license) in some format. How much you pay does not matter as long as the transaction is for a permanent (indefinite time length) license and not blatantly a rental. This legitimate copy does not have to be purchased directly from the IP Rights holder or their designated and authorized (re)sellers.
2. You are 100% unable to obtain a reasonable, purchasable, legal copy in your city of residence through any physical or digital means. Any Digital options available to you must not be reasonably obtainable due to unreasonable cost of buy-in.

Notably:

Both rules exclude the ability to "Rent" a piece of content from somewhere, "Borrow" it from a library and "Buy" it online from a digital market place that is exclusive to a piece of technology you do not own and do not plan to, and would not elect to purchase.

As an example; any and all content that is exclusively available on iTunes or exclusively through using an iDevice is not reasonably obtainable; I do not own an Apple device, I do not wish to buy or own one. I would be within my rights to pirate any content I see as desirable. I despise Apple and refuse to use their products; so I am within my rights to pirate anything that requires you to use an Apple device or account to access the right to purchase it.

This would not be acceptable if the content were available through Google Play; as I already own an Android Smartphone, and the marketplace is reasonably accessible and reasonably priced in most cases.

This does not include situations where accessing the ability to purchase content requires a large number of convoluted steps. For example; I shouldn't be required to mail in a letter only to obtain a temporary credential necessary to access the purchasing front-end, submit more personally identifying information than necessary to fill an order in an account creation process, or be required to call a specific phone number to support to ask for an exception to a policy or permission to purchase or retain access to a purchase.

As a final clarification: Streaming == Renting.

No 'ifs', 'ands', or 'buts' about it. A streaming service is renting access to a specific batch of content for an agreed upon price, paid at a regular interval. This is not a purchase. Instead it is a patronage agreement.

I think that a system where we should abstain from things that are basically free to reproduce (i.e. things you can pirate) is dumb. There are many movies that I probably wouldn't pay money to but that I've pirated. The companies that own the rights to the movie don't lose any sale they would have otherwise made but I get whatever enjoyment I get from watching the movie at least, so it's a net win.

When I pay may bills at the end of the month I also put some money towards paying for things that I've pirated that I like, usually with a focus on smaller creators. It doesn't really feel meaningful to pay for a marvel movie for example. It's not really a perfect system but neither is artificially limiting the access to digital media.

I do not know about the video but i can't agree with this table. Even if you don't buy it an artist work should be spread if you're not the one buying it by talking about it or just seeding you'll allow someone to support the author. This makes piracy look like some grey thing, IT IS NOT.

Support the artists and if you can't or don't want to, spread the word this is how it works.

Amogus with a broken back

I can't stand Rossman's videos; but I respect the hell out of his ideas, principles, and efforts to better the slices of technological life that he cares about.

Yeah I'm number 15

I go straight to the bottom of the barrel

The only time I see piracy as unethical is if you would have paid for it otherwise and it's a small creator who will actually notice the lesser revenue. This covers very, VERY few cases because the vast majority of the time if something is good enough to want to pirate it, it's popular enough that more than enough people paid for it to adequately compensate the creator.

Basically, are you hurting the creator's ability to make a living by pirating it? Giving them less money when they already have more than enough doesn't qualify.

The whole point of "ethical" piracy is ridiculous. It's old good corporate anti-piracy propaganda but rechewed with some progressive takes. "You wouldn't download an indie car", literally. If you need some justifications and excuses for piracy, than just don't pirate at all. The fact that i'm downloading some game from torrent because i've broken purchased DVD with it never makes me more ethical in any way than some other leecher on the same torrent who's never going to pay for it.

What's the significance of the colors? Greenish = "stealing", orange = "okay", yellow = "grey area"? Seems awfully negative, maybe invert the whole thing.

I am 12 to 15

Okay, but what the heck do the colors mean??

Im glad your useing OpenDocument.

I can't really afford to pay for some things. I feel like pirating indie games is hurting indie creators by showing there's demand for pirating them, making it more likely indie games will be pirated.

So I only play indie games that were originally released free of charge to begin with.

For AAA games, I pirate freely.

For anything else, I pirate without much thought of the morals and ethics of it (that is some music (from the 60s-80s so I'm not hurting creators) and movies/tv that are oftentimes not keeping up to the standard expected and make their money at the cinemas anyways (and for the TV shows, they have already made more than enough, as I don't really follow anything newly released))

I see a whole lotta “yes” in that graph. 🏴‍☠️