Immoral piracy is the killing of the crew during the hijacking of a ship. There is no moral dilemma in downloading anything.

Educational piracy is even more justified. Knowledge should never be paywalled.

Entertainment companies are morally bankrupt because of how much they take from the people actually doing work to give to CEOs. I don't care if people get that content for free since nearly none of the revenue will go towards the creators. But they are at least somewhat reimbursing the labor that goes into the content.

The academic journals do not do any work whatsoever and charge absolutely absurd prices for access. They get free peer review from the community, they certainly don't write any of the content. It is a moral imperative to prevent them from profiting off of other people's work. Hope they lose all their ill-gotten gains.

Lol no

I believe that information and knowledge should be free anyways (at least in a perfect world), because that leads to the betterment of society. Also if you are able to use the knowledge you learn from the things you pirate I think you’ll be able to come back and support those things that got you to where you are.

If i paid for every required college textbook I would be broke. I'm already broke now, but that's a different story.

I just label entertainment as a form culture and avoid the dichotomy altogether!

It's all food for the mind. And The Jesus had some very compelling views on the morality of copy/pasting food until everybody was fed. CC0

When knowledge is deliberately gated by large entities and the author would give it away for free (scientific papers) is a no-brainer for me. Or when a course requires specific textbooks that costs hundreds of dollars.

No difference imo

I think most would much rather screw the middleman (Subscription services, publishers, etc) pirate the material, and then send money directly to the creator if they like them.

I don’t like that these businesses can tell you that you’re gonna get something but hide the actual pertinent details like:

• no refunds
• the game isn’t even completed and you’ll have to buy DLC to see the rest
• big streaming company offers this resolution and bitrate but what we don’t tell you is that we don’t guarantee that for every device

People have no problem buying an item as it’s marketed, but when you start fucking with and scamming/tricking consumers is when you really kick the fucking hornets nest.

I’ve also seen others mention that sometimes pirating the material meant more freedom with the content they now own a copy of. With 3rd party self hosted streaming services you can do cool things like watch stuff with your friends, watch stuff when you’re away from home, etc.

There used to be a time prior to throw away consumerism where you bought something and it was yours. You buy a painting? It’s yours to resell. Buy a record? Play it with some friends or sell that too.

A long time ago these greedy piggy middleman stepped in and started inflating with bullshit tactics like reducing your degrees of freedom with your newly owned product.

They want you to believe in this new world where you don’t get physical anything, everything’s restricted, milked until bleeding, leaving everyone wondering why everything “sucks” all of a sudden.

Cough cough, tv, movies, games rn unless made my smaller studios

I’ve got an interesting book for you!

How Music Got Free (nonfic piece about 90s-early 2000s piracy)