Inspired by a post since deleted, I feel bad for probably coming off judgemental about the poster’s taste in the movie that drove him to consider sailing.
The earliest desired media I can remember that drove me to figure out sailing was DC Talk, a Christian rock band. Pop music was not allowed in my house, so a Christian group was tantalizing and scandalous to a rebellious, young Vanth. Things escalated from there.
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When I was a poor student I pirated everything. Music, software, games, you name it.
Now that I have a good stable income, I pay for the things I want because I want to encourage artists and developers. But corporations and capitalism are ruining it all.
So, I’m changing my habits. Paying money where it actually has a significant impact on the creators, (like going to live concerts and shows, buying albums directly from the artist or from their own site, buying indie games from small studios, going to watch movies from studios that respect their employees and artists and unions) and pirating the ever loving shit out of everything else coming out of a large corporation.
This seems the most ethical to me. Don’t pirate smaller stuff. I would say it’s ethical to also pirate where the artist has passed away and it’s just their estate who get the money, but I’d take that on a case by case basis.
I paid over $1k about 10 years ago for music software. My computer killed itself, so I made a new one and redownloaded the software…but the company said I’m an imposter. After years of fighting with them, they refused to activate my paid software despite proving my identity and showing proof of purchase. I didn’t choose to pirate, the system chose for me
“You merely adopted piracy, I was born in it, molded by it”
Sounds like a new Netflix movie plot.
lol imagine if Netflix made a show glorifying piracy
And we pirate it.
First time, it was because I was a kid that couldn’t pay for the movies/music/games I wanted. The high seas provided me with a solution for that.
Then I started making money and Netflix streaming came along making it both cheap and convenient. I docked my ship and forgot about my pirate life for a long time. Everything was good, living a quiet life…
But then the corporate greed caught up and ruined everything. Streaming prices became absurd, content got fragmented to way too many services and they fucking started introducing ads.
So here I am, setting sail once again. I didn’t need or want this, but they have forced my hand with their infinite greed.
Same for me - I got fed up of using JustWatch to check which (if any) of my subscribed streaming platforms had the film I wanted, open said platform, search for the film, find out it’s not actually available (or I have to pay on top of my subscription), and rage quit.
I even looked for a way to use lots of streaming platforms from the same interface, but of course you can’t do that cause DRM/lockin/etc.
Yeah they’re fighting really hard to combat piracy, but at the same time all their decisions are what is actively pushing their customers (back) to piracy.
Don’t forget deleting things you “bought” from right out under your nose.
Seriously, I did the same thing, early times pirating, only for my whole family. And when Netflix was good, requests for TV shows and movies went way down. I only had to pirate really obscure stuff that wasn’t easily accessible.
But now I’m back in full swing, more than ever before honestly, out of necessity. And I don’t see it slowing down.
I’ve never “bought” digital streaming media for that exact reason, so that happened impacted me personally. I didn’t trust them to begin with and I was right in not doing so. But yeah, that’s definitely also a shitty move and valid reason to pirate IMO.
Wanted a game. Was too expensive. said “fuck it” and set sail.
Funny story the other way around: the year is 2002 and I live in Laos. Bootlegs Everything Galore, all movies games music cost $1 or about. I discover a game, and then begins a quest to buy The Real Version because it’s a small studio and I really like it all, the storytelling, the modding tools, the community… A quest that would end up in Bangkok looking like the proverbial insane foreigner looking for the most stupid way to spend his money.
I found it eventually, in a shop that didn’t look any different among all its brothers in Pantip Plaza. Took me a while lol.
Wanted a game, back then wasn’t available in my country unless I travelled 3 hours to a city that had one store that had the game, also was too expensive and no way I would’ve convinced parents to spend it on game. Shores of high sea are always at your doorstep.
Cable installer guy came to the house one time… Hooked up internet and asked me if I was going to Torrent or not. I had no idea what he was talking about as this was 2005.
Did some googling canceled my cable subscription and I never looked back.
Got off the The seas when Netflix was big… And then all that changed again…
So here we are again.
I remember feeling liberated when streaming became big. Dealing with potential fake files, low quality, or having something stuck on 95% with no seeders was something I wasn’t going to miss when I ditched piracy for Netflix… then the streaming wars began and here I come crawling back.
I’m on Usenet now. With the arr applications it makes it a lot easier and I rarely am unable to find something. Not to mention maxing out bandwidth and downloading the entire file.
I didn’t have money as a kid. I still don’t have money.
Corporate greed.
Are we counting like Ares and Limewire? I just wanted to listen to music and could never pay it. That turned into software I wanted but couldn’t buy. Then I stopped for a while and started up again years ago not wanting to pay for streaming
Ares! I can’t find an English wikipedia article about it 😮 Just found out it was written in delphi and opensource.
Those were the days… DC++, Ares, Limewire, Napster, Emule, Bearshare… so many things just to download the latest Linkin Park. Only for it to end up being porn 😅
I never really asked why everything was porn. But like… why?
Cause people like porn. I’ll be honest, when I downloaded some music video or something that ended up being porn, I usually wasn’t too disappointed, with the exception that I now had to go find what I was originally looking for again and wait for it to download. Shit used to take forever back in the day.
Yeah, but I don’t see the point. If I’m looking for a song, I don’t want porn. It’s not like you’d find more than enough porn when searching for it.
My guess is it was a way to “hide” it, when back on the day most people shared a computer. But idk
I haven’t seen that name in ages. I think Kazaa Lite, Imesh and Audio Galaxy were the first file sharing programs I ever used.
Subscriptions, subscriptions everywhere
Yes. And also ease of use plus much better quality.
I love sea men, and free stuff.
The first time or the second time?
The first time was because I was sick of paying the “Australia tax” for new releases that took longer to reach us than most of the rest of the world. The second time was due to subscription fee hikes with associated reduction in quality & range of content.
I was sick of paying the “Australia tax” for new releases that took longer to reach us than most of the rest of the world.
Exactly this, except I actually stopped for a long time when Netflix first came out and wasn’t geo-restricted… then the enshittification started.
Convenience. Well, nowadays that is. And I only started again after the enshittification of streaming services started. I buy all my games legally, just motion picture that I get from the seas.
As a kid/teenager it was more about the money. We cracked games to play on LAN parties without everyone having to have a (retail) copy etc.
Yeah steam is where it’s at. I’m sure it won’t last, and they have their own problems. But for now? It really is a service problem with TV and movies.
I can easily buy and own a game from steam, play it on my deck and get updates, no muss no fuss.
Exactly the same here too. As a teenager we also all pitched in on a CD burner when they first came out and kept it at the BBS’s owners place, I just remember a single CD took forever back then when it was 1x and 2x recording speed. That allowed us to share a ton more without everyone having to get together on the LAN.
Absolutely. I was thinking of the CD/DVD burning speeds back then. For example, I learned through trial and error that burning at 52x speed for a PS2 game often made it impossible for the console to read the disc. So I had to resort to slower burn speeds like 4x and it worked like a charm. Never got around to actually understanding the reason behind this.
TLDR; It started as a young teen who just wanted to get games for free; It continues because companies don’t give two flying hoots about me.
Currently, I pirate because I can’t rightfully give any money to these anti-consumer companies that will only victimize me. I can’t own anything anymore, and this absolutely frustrates me. If I could own the media I purchase, I wouldn’t pirate anymore. (by this I mean I wouldn’t pirate the media I consume. I’d still data hoard because it’s a literal addiction, please help!!)
I don’t pirate games anymore; or better said, I rarely pirate games, and when I do they’re ran in a VM with VFIO because I really don’t like the idea of running arbitrary code on my system; even though we have reputable, vetted, and trustworthy groups. (As a general rule, I don’t trust what I can’t verify.) I buy all my games on Steam for convenience, and I opt to use Goldberg’s Steam Emulator (which is open source!!) to store backups of my games, and this setup works wonderfully! I stay away from games with invasive DRM like Denuvo (I play these in a VM), and I’ve long stopped buying EA and Ubisoft games. The only forms of media I pirate nowadays are movies, and music (and the occasional game).
I think it was a game that needed activations to play and I ran out of activations or something. Predictably, pirating it was the better experience in every way.
Ironically mine started without nefarious connotations… The family computer in the mid 80s was a minor novelty to me for ages, only good for simple text games really. Then…
My brother grabbed a cracked game toward 1990 off a BBS. The game itself I don’t even remember, but it had a cracktro that stunned me. Graphics I’d never seen, actual music out our little adlib card… Was crazy enticing.
Being stuck in the Midwest US while enamored with DemoScene is a hell of a drug. Every few kb down that modem was like crack.
That then opened a new world of games as well… Things my older brother had no interest in. Things my parents obviously would not have allowed. You know… The Good Shit ™️.
Obviously once codecs caught up video and audio quickly became a thing. My closest buddy and I would burn stack after stack of CDs to take a spindle at a time over to share between us and others.
Then the data hoarding set in… What good is just having these shiny things for yourself when you can share? True joy doesn’t exist without spreading it to others.
The sickness persists… Stronger than ever despite becoming a pessimistic old man. Multiple gigabit connections: check. 200tb arrays just for torrents: check. Seed times tracked in years: check.
Remember when 14.4k was the most epic thing for grabbing those disks at lightning speed? I certainly do.
