The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it
- Paul Muad’DibLiving in Australia means piracy is essentially legal - individuals can only be taken to court for the cost of one physical copy of the pirated media, so companies don’t even bother as long as you aren’t distributing. The more things in this area get worse, the more justified I feel in filling up my 10TB HDD.
In the US its the service providers that get in trouble not the users
In Italy nobody gives a fuck, unless you start making people pay for your piracy service (e.g. illegal sports streaming)
That’s why I’ll keep buying physical for the games or movies I love.
The only question I have is what’s gonna happen as game discs are just becoming an access token to download the game and its updates.
I’d have nothing against digital games or movies if you didn’t see such behaviors.
The only question I have is what’s gonna happen as game discs are just becoming an access token to download the game and its updates.
That’s a big concern. There’s communities trying to document which games are complete on the media and can be played from start to end without updates (so no major game-breaking bugs or huge performance issues) like this one:
I’m also part of a FB group that collects cartridge information for Switch games, to document if there’s revisions with all updates included.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1CEABCBrPv1tWf89hSZqUunK0JW-sQo8XpxuvZhdtHQs/edit#gid=0
It’s good that people are worrying about this. Although, I haven’t heard of any disc game not being able to be played. I guess it would only happen if Sony/Microsoft go bankrupt or decide to close PlayStation/Xbox game updates servers.
It ain’t likely to happen but it’s important to be able to preserve games for the future as they are part of history just like paintings.
If buying isn’t owning, then pirating isn’t stealing.
Fair winds and following seas to you fellow sailors, arrrrr
I can understand piracy when they take away something you’ve already bought, but I’d not want to do it for something I haven’t bought yet.
I wanna be able to support people creating what I like.
Though I agree about ‘financial support for content creator’ I think our model of copyright doesn’t work.
I’d love your opinion
Should a content creator keep making money forever once something is produced ? Would you prefer to buy rather than pirate a movie that was made 100 years ago ? Let’s say you never bought any Charlie Chaplin movie, would you buy it if you wanted to watch it ?
The reason I ask is because I’m still unclear myself about what is morally right on this topic. I tend to pirate a lot nowadays because I don’t know how to support content creators without filling the pockets of intermediary leeches
My personal rule is that I’ll buy it as long as the original creators are profiting from new sales. So I’m happy to buy Switch games, but I’m probably not going to buy N64 games because they’re not available from the original devs.
I may buy even if that’s not the case if buying is a better experience than getting it some other way.
If DRM-free digital copies existed for movies, I’d buy them. But they don’t, so I buy physical media and rip it to my NAS.
I actually probably provide more support for the things I like because I pirate. Look at it this way - if I had to subscribe to a million services, I just wouldn’t watch a lot of things (because I don’t like spending money month over month for services). Now, I download what I want to watch, and if it’s good I go and tell my friends and family (who aren’t pirates) how good it is and they go and watch it, bringing more eyeballs to their show/movie than they would’ve had otherwise. Pirating isn’t stealing or taking away from creatives imo
I can’t agree, but I can agree to disagree with you.
For me as long as you’re not paying for some form of art, you’re not supporting the artist, so you’re stealing.
But I’d be the first one to download a torrent if something I paid for kind of disappeared like this.
Haha agree to disagree. I’m paying them through eXpOsuRe (jk)
Yeah I don’t feel an ounce of remorse about it, but if I did I probably wouldn’t do it!
Buy physical media
If you are into collecting, that is. I am kind of triggered by the binary “physical vs. non-owned” because physical is not for everyone, if I was dead set on paying and the media was not available DRMless, I would rather buy a digital copy plus pirate a DRMless one corresponding to it. Buying a disk only to throw it out after ripping is wasteful. If you keep them, they take up too much space and are too inconvenient to use compared to a few external drives.
Your describing a practice not everyone is ok with. I buy media and put it into my media cabinet. When I get rid of media I delete any copies I may still have of it.
I mean, disks take up a ton of space - not everyone is comfortable with that either. If I did that, I would have had to throw out or bother selling the disks.
Your missing the point. I keep the disk because that is the original media. Once the original media is gone so it the right to watch it.
I don’t download any illegal media. I just use the physical medium I paid for. Without that medium I no longer have the right to the media.
Imagine enforcing shitty copyright laws on yourself like some code of honor. We developed the technology to make infinite copies of any media and then spend endless resources fighting it because it undermines our parasitic economic model.
Imagine for a moment that society embraced the full potential of digital technology. We could have a library of all human art and knowledge ever produced available for free, instantly, everywhere. If book libraries didn’t already exist and were proposed today the excuses for rejecting it would be the same. The answer is also the same, change our economic model to support people’s basic needs unconditionally and directly subsidize the production we need/want (like art).
Once the original media is gone so it the right to watch it.
But who would check that? A raid? This is so pointless. You are not using it, you have paid for it, you are just occupying space with a useless piece of plastic…
Eh, they’re not that big, especially if you discard the cases and store them in a binder.
I would also rather buy digital, but in general, they’re not available DRM-free. I can rip the DRM from physical media, so that’s what I do. Pirating is technically illegal, even if I own license, so that’s not something I’m interested in.
You’re okay ripping DRM illegally, but “piracy” is a bridge too far. To copyright holders they’re the same thing.
I’m not a lawyer, but I think there’s a legal defense under the DMCA, here’s the applicable part of the code:
(B) The prohibition contained in subparagraph (A) shall not apply to persons who are users of a copyrighted work which is in a particular class of works, if such persons are, or are likely to be in the succeeding 3-year period, adversely affected by virtue of such prohibition in their ability to make noninfringing uses of that particular class of works under this title, as determined under subparagraph ©.
Subparagraph C describes the process by which the Librarian of Congress reviews such exemptions, and specifically calls out non-profit and educational use.
AFAIK, this provision hasn’t been tested for a regular home user making digital backups of their copy-protected media for non-infringing use. There’s a plausible defense here: I can’t use a DVD player on my phone, so this law restricts my ability to make non-infringing use of the material I own when traveling without access to a DVD player (AFAIK, those don’t exist on planes or at campsites) or my physical DVD. So it’s reasonable to use a digital copy so that I can do non-profit research with the content on disks I own.
To me, that seems like a reasonable interpretation of the exception under this provision, and I think it has a reasonable chance of being upheld in a court of law. I don’t think it’s ever been tried, because copyright owners don’t care about people making backups, and they wouldn’t want to set legal precedent about this either. This argument hinges on whether ripping for home use can be considered “educational purposes.”
So yes, I’m okay with ripping DRM from a disk I own because I think there’s a legitimate legal defense. There isn’t a legitimate legal defense for piracy, at least not one I’m aware of.
This is what I think about people using VPNs to access content. You’re still accessing it contrary to the license agreement, it’s still piracy. Just download it instead of paying for a VPN company to advertise on YouTube.
Companies should be sued for false advertising if they claim that their streaming service allows you to “buy” or “own” anything (unless their service includes non-DRM downloads for permanent offline storage). All you’re buying is temporary use of their rental network and library. Which is fine if that’s what you wanted and knew you were getting, but a problem if you were expecting something else.
Honestly what they could do is allow you to buy the Bluray. That would make me happier.
A couple months ago, I didn’t buy a cheap Blu-ray drive and did not download MakeMKV. Since I did not do this, I can’t report on how great it is.
In the US it is a grey area. I think they should be more explicit and allow you to make a copy on a different medium as long as you aren’t sharing it outside of a household.
If someone actively engages in piracy they should be subject to a small and reasonable fine similar to a speeding ticket.
The other concern is censorship. Essentially a movie that you bought is on a server and then someone’s decided that words, content, or scenes are no longer appropriate. The video, song, etc, is different from the original and without any notification. The old scenes get sent to the memory hole. Oh dear Winston, I fear we will meet soon!
Piracy is pretty much the only way the original Star Wars movies are still available.
“I am altering the movie. Pray I don’t alter it any further.” - George Lucas, probably.
