Memes

Spotify basically killing limewire is not evidence of that any more than saying radio made the music industry be reasonable since it’s just as killed.

why do you think people were pirating music instead of buying albums? Why do you think spotify immediately picked up lots of users instead of people just pirating, it's basic free market swings.

Because streaming services have been charging more for less content, as the content owners have come to realize how much streaming cannibalizes purchases from other revenue streams.

yeah, and people don't like getting stiffed.

I’m not trying to argue that people don’t pirate less when there are cheap convenient services available. I agree with that. But that’s just people behaving in their own self-interest, not some moral good about fighting big companies or other stuff pirates say to feel better about it.

you could argue it's self interest based, but fucking anything anybody does ever is self interest based. There is no world where someone does something that isn't self interest based in even the littlest of quantities.

I'm not saying it's moral, you can argue about the morality of it all you want, but at the end of the day, i think archival is more morally respectable than killing content and removing it from the market permanently for no other reason than "haha funny"

Killing people is morally bad, killing people who kill other people is morally good. (generally)

my primary argument is that it's basic market forces driving it, arguing about morals is just appeal to the corporation for producing bad market products. If you want to appeal to someone, go donate money to the unions for actors or whatever. Go support an indie film, go donate money directly to people whom you like and support.

What I don’t accept is the self-righteous pirates who try to act like they’re doing something good for society,

how can you disagree with this? There are SO many examples of piracy done for the good of either, the public, or human history.

For example, there used to be a website that hosted all kinds of repair and service manuals for medical devices. It was DMCAd and then taken down. This website, arguably helped to save the lives of tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of people throughout the years.

What about libgen? The entire purposes of this project is to bring works into the field of public access for nothing other then the benefit of the common person.

What about the darkweb for people who live in places that are overly persecutory, not exactly piracy, but distributing religious works in places where religion is restricted is equally as important for internet pirates as is archiving a culturally relevant TV show.

like I should be thanking them for downloading the shows I helped pay for

what if for example, you were, idk let's say, watching community, the iconic TV show, on a streaming service, because to my knowledge, they don't produce blurays of it anymore (it's on amazon, but i've seen it disappear before so) or maybe you just don't like blurays because optical media sucks, and bluray players are terrible. Or perhaps, like me you like a heavily integrated content system that you have full control over. Such that you can watch the content in full resolution, without being restricted, or being hit with a terrible UI, or having to deal with a logged in service, that has to have internet access. Sure you could rip a bluray, but if you think that's easy you've never tried.

Only to discover that they've pulled a few episodes, and they're considered to be "lost media" or something. Now what? You're gonna buy the bluray, and deal with using a secondary form of media just for the one episode that they pulled?

What about shows like mythbusters, which to my knowledge, have NEVER been released on physical media (though i believe they recently sold the video rights to another corpo, so maybe that already happened, or it will happen soon? IDK)

here's a fun fact, discovery+ is a terrible platform, genuinely awful video player, better hope you don't want to do any player customization what so ever. Maybe you don't feel like watching it stretched? Oops, too bad, you can only watch it stretched.

Also to be clear, i'm not saying you should thank me for shit you don't care about, that's fine. You'll find something someone archived some day and be happy that it was archived by someone like me, and really appreciate the work they've done. I'm just saying you probably shouldn't be so defensive about it. Pirates are defensive about it because the industry fucking sucks. The law fucking sucks, and politics fucking sucks. We're doing what we can the best that we can. It's not about people like you, it's about corpos like disney.

and pretending that it has no impact whatsoever on the people who depend on that for their income.

there have been a few studies regarding this topic, there was one study in the EU that was done, and it's circulated on the darknet every so often, claiming that piracy has a minimal impact. For music artists? A lot of them have material on bandcamp, or independently released services. And it's also just a fucking wav file I'm perfectly ok with paying money for music from an artist that i like and support. Primarily because it's just a WAV file, and i can just put it into a music player. That's all i need. A lot of people go to shows and buy merch or other physical garb. I'd give money directly to artists if they let me. Numerous times artists have released their music on torrents, and had it be rather successful.

There are also artists with rather hard to find albums and titles like woob, who pull entire albums. The collectors CD market is a little bit fucked. I'm not paying some random dude 50 USD for a CD of one album just because it's rare. That money doesn't even support the artist.

My single favorite thing about the internet, is that if i decided that i wanted to learn about metal casting in the early 1900's and late 1800's that i can pull up the internet archive, find some material written about it that's been archived, and then just fucking read it. There's all kinds of shit out there that's akin to that, which arguably constitutes as piracy, but is for the public good regardless.

I want an engineering tables book? That's just fucking out there, and i can have it. A book about machining? Again it's all just out there.