1. When the content is no longer available for retail purchase (i.e old games or shows that have been pulled entirely [see Infinity Train])
2. You have a physical copy, but want a digital version.

Scientific articles. You're not robbing the authors of a single penny, because they don't get a cut of the sales by the publishing house anyway and the journal reviewers are volunteers.

1. Content that you cannot acquire by any "lawful" means.
2. Content that you already own a copy of (Yes, this includes "only" having a "license" to it; you own what you own).
3. Content that is outrageously priced, and/or from large companies where the people who worked on the product will receive nothing from sold copies. (EA, Activision, Ubisoft, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, etc)

Any piracy related to scientific papers I consider ethical. That kind of knowledge should NEVER be hidden behind a paywall

Abandonware is a very clear cut case of ethical piracy, too. Without it, a lot of digital stuff "wouldn't exist" anymore. Mainly games, but also loads of productivity programs, doubly so for discontinued platforms, like Amiga computers.

When the money goes to people who did not create the media. Support creators, not exploiters.

Archival of information and software that is no longer available, such as NES games.

Any and all book piracy is ethical. It's just like a library. If libraries are ethical libgen is ethical.

to answer the opposite of your question i would say it’s unethical to steal things from indie developers and creators; the same way its more wrong to steal from a local corner store than it is to steal from Walmart

Anything I'm legally not allowed to buy. So, old videogames (not just Nintnedo) or content of streaming services that show fuck you to my country.

I think something most folks can agree on is abandonware. If there is literally no way to purchase something and you want to buy it then I don't think people should be angry that you "stole" it.

Pirating copies of games I have already paid for a "license" for is ethical IMO. I want to be able to have offline-capable backups that can't be taken away from me.

IMO it's better to not pirate small indie content (mostly games in my case).

If a product is no longer for sale on any storefront, or the edition for sale is lacking content had by previous versions of the same product, piracy is morally correct for the sake of archival and preservation

Most people here arguing that the "ethical side" of piracy is when the media is not available elsewhere. Or if it's available but at an abusive price/requirements. To which I agree.

But I also believe that culture shouldn't be only for those who can afford it. Books, movies, videogames, tvshows, education, science is what makes a society culturally rich. This is exactly why we have libraries. It's a public service. I've seen teens become avid consumers and incredibly knowledgeable in certain subjects, to the point that they are making a living because of it. Because the internet allow them to explore and grow. Without a pricetag nor preassure on their families.

Heck! Even I pirated almost everything in my teen years. Nowdays I pay for a lot of media. Don't get me wrong, we should be supporting artists. Always. If possible.

If it's not possible, go ahead just pirate it. Piracy it's just the best digital library in history. With a heavy euphemism attached: "piracy" (the act of attacking ships in order to sack them, kill people, rape people). It has a bad connotation on purpose. Don't fall for it.

Edit: punctuation

If I have already purchased a copy of the physical media, I don’t think it is piracy to acquire a digital copy of the same media for personal use

Music Producer input here. It's sort of been a general rule of etiquette in production that piracy is fine if you intend to buy the product.

A lot of the better plugins can be very expensive and prior to subscription models, were limited in free trials. It can take some time to know if a particular plugin works with your workflow and gives you the results you like over multiple different projects.

I've always stuck with this. If I see something I like the look of, I'll pirate it, use it over a bunch of projects and if I find myself relying on it then I'll save up to buy it legitimately. Of course, there's a fair bit of trust involved there, and a lot of people will be happy enough to keep the pirated version and try to find a new crack every time the DAW or plugin requires an update,

No chance I would have been able to afford half of the software I use in my workflow when I first started out, nobody can. But I eventually found my flow then caught up and paid it back.

I consider that ethical piracy. Or maybe I'm just justifying it to myself. But that's how it was implied when I first started out in college and it's a good system where you can still eventually support the small companies that make quality products that work for you.

There should be a way to pay only the workers when you buy something. In that case, you could pay them but only after pirating and making sure you enjoy it. Since there is nothing like that, I think you should pay only content from small creators. Big creators already have plenty, and paying for anything else just gives money to greedy executives who then lower the quality of the content to make more money. Of course, if you have the means and don't pay anything, you are just making sure there will be less of that content made in the future. It isn't scalable; if everybody pirated content without paying a single cent, there would be no content made except by hobbyists who don't want to make a living out of it.

If the product is no longer available to buy officially.

If the product required prohibitively complicated methods to play it (VPN, specific hardware requirements) which can be circumvented by pirating means, so, by extension, I mean region locked software or media in general.

When the quality I want is not available; a stream of a movie in 1080 or very compressed 4k which I want to see in the best quality possible.

Any streaming content that gets pulled from a service and isn't available elsewhere.

When it comes to video games, if I cannot legally buy new copies of games for that system, then it becomes open season on Piracy and emulation. Recent example, the 3DS eShop

Many people already said stuff I agree with, but I'd also include low-income families being "justified" in pirating stuff, be it for work, study or entertainment (as entertainment is a basic right imo)

Ethical piracy is a reddit fallacy(which I used to believe too) where people think showing a company a middle finger is acceptable.

The solution is to use FOSS, and kill their stranglehold on the market

Take adobe's crap for example... they are big because of the students pirating it, expecting employers to pay for their license in the future. Creative cloud is all they learn and then it's hard for them to switch to freemium or libre options, so they pirate it.

This happens with ms office too! We were taught how to use word, excel, powerpoint as kids, and now are forced to use those since everyone around us uses those...

Well, starting with, if you own an original copy. Sometimes companies put stupid DRMs in some digital stuff that just make the life of buyers miserable, games love to do that. For me is always ethical to pirate these ones.

Second, anything that you don't have money to buy, if you will never buy this stuff I can´t see why is bad to pirate, you are not stealing anyone, and I know a lot of cases (me included) that a person pirated something to test and then buy the thing after.

Education, similar to the prior, if a book or anything is not affordable to ppl that are willing to study an area, for me is totally ethical to pirate, this is a very common situation in third world countries where the dollar is very expensive causing books that are imported to be too expensive to students.

For ethical piracy, I would say definitely if the content is no longer available through official channels.

Other situations include:

• downloading a copy of equal quality to one you already have a physical copy of, but don’t have the equipment to rip it
• really old stuff that should be public domain, but isn’t because copyright law is broken
• downloading the cracked copy of a game because DRM in your purchased copy makes it unusable

I personally avoid DRM protected digital purchases unless I can strip it out. I prefer ripping movies myself, but I don’t have any issues buying DRM-free music. I also wouldn’t mind paying for a kindle book given that I can always import it into Calibre and end up with a DRM-free copy.

Here is a quick hot take: If a company ever advertised a product in a public setting and the content is no longer available for purchase in a retail setting/manner anyone should be free to acquire it via non-retail means. Full stop.

For me it concerns the intersection of privacy and piracy (and ownership).

My conceptions of ownership: I give money and receive a product in return. That ends my relationship with the seller.

But, increasingly (or almost exclusively on online marketplaces) businesses expect we will pay them for, essentially, the privilege of becoming their products. They control digital media as a means to record every action and behavior about us, the users, in order to bundle and sell our information to data brokers and other ad partners.

So, essentially, if buying something does not give me full ownership (possession of media) and is simply a means for a business to spy on me and harvest my data by controlling that media, then I'll pirate.

It's unethical and dangerous to use a transaction to spy on customers.

Piracy is a service problem. They keep making it harder for people to watch things, and piracy gets easier every day.

If it comes from a large corporation, its probably ethical, since they are exploiting you (or others) in an unethical way.

If it's an indie team (or one man team for that matter) then it's probably unethical.

-Not available to buy or only second hand for exorbitant prices (cough cough Nintendo) -Overpriced subscription (cough cough Adobe) -Getting a version of a game you already bought free of invasive or resource-heavy -Trying out a paid program/game/etc. with the intent of buying it if it you like it and it runs well

For me the primary question is "Am I willing and able to buy this firsthand".

The latter is the most obvious. For instance, Nintendo won't sell me a game for the ds no matter how willing I am to buy. Therefore, I have no issues with pirating said game since they refuse to distribute it.

The former is more nuanced. Sometimes it's a matter of distain for the company and their business practices, such as Adobe. Sometimes it's a matter of the thing being incredibly overpriced. Sometimes it's just something that contributes so little value to me the only reason I'd interact with it is if it's free. Sometimes it's lack of knowledge about what I'm getting, and I want to try it first.

Also when it comes to Anime specifically, I try to support creators in other ways because my objections to the licensing companies in the US has nothing to do with the content itself.

It is always justified to pirate something. Private property is a scam, and intellectual property even more so; there is no justification for these concepts that does not boil down to "because the current dominant economic paradigm requires them in order to function" or "possessions are more important than people." Information should always be free. Period.

Anything by a company in the S&P 500. No reason to pad corporate earnings.

E.g. Minecraft years back no. Minecraft now that it is owned by Microsoft. Go for it.

I’d say that there’s a scale

‘pirating’ an abandonware PC game that has long been left by the original devs, and isn’t for sale anywhere legally - this is still illegal under most laws, despite their being no legal routes to buy it at all legally. Most sane people don’t think this is unethical.

But downloading a hacked version of an app or game developed by a tiny independent team that truly care about the product, and invest the profits back in it - I say that this is unethical, as the people you are stealing from are directly affected by your actions. If you bought this game or app, your money goes directly to them, and they are more likely to keep developing other things.

Adobe, MS and the like have billions, so piracy has less of a direct impact on them -

So yeah, for me it’s a scale of ethical piracy - and you have to draw the line where you feel comfortable

Piracy makes up for some huge inequalities in the world. The prices for digital goods do not usually take into account the economies of certain regions. I live in Morocco and our money is really low compared to the dollar. 1 dollar is like 7 Dirhams. The average salary for a normal job is really low if you convert it to dollars. So services like Netflix and HBO would cost 10 times more if you factor in wages and conversion to dollars. Why should we pay that just because we live in another place ? Why do these services pretend to be global and yet they are enforcing US prices on the rest of the world. You can't even speak of physical goods because Amazon doesn't give a fuck about Africa. Books would cost 3 times their price in shipping and you have to wait a month or so, not to mention that there are limits on how much currency you spend internationally. The fees for an international card are so high also. In short, without piracy 90 percent of the world wouldn't be able to partake in anything.

1. Work where the original author is dead. (The money is not going to the author).

The concept of intellectual property is incoherent IMO. Thus, in principle, it's never wrong to pirate anything because you're not actually stealing anything.

However, I personally have a principle that I never pirate anything from small creators, at least not without compensation to them. It's one thing to pirate from a multi-billion dollar mega-corp. But a small time creator who is trying to make a living, that is different for me. I always throw them money if they have a donation page or buy some merch, etc.