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”
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.
I’ve been sailing the high seas, or at least skirting the shores, since the late 1980s when my classmates and I were swapping BBC Micro software on 5¼" disks! Moved onto PC in 1990 and carried on. I even cracked a few games back in the day :-) These days I don’t pirate so much, and I have quite a collection of legitimate music and software.
My wife and I were piss poor and getting finance degree at a third rate state college. I was paying my way with PC support. One day I spent money I didn’t have to buy a Wndows NT certification book and used the university’s T1 line to pirate NT 4.0 for myself and MS SQL and Oracle 7 for my wife (I also bought a CD of Red Hat Halloween). Almost thirty years later we literally saved a presidential election and are the ones keeping significant parts of the US infrastructure from falling apart. All thanks to piracy.
Was a student, couldn’t afford CDs.
Nowadays I
- don’t want to subscribe to too many streaming services, each just having a few things I want to watch. Also I broke my neck and I’m now on disability, there’s no budget to waste, at all.
- Like to watch old shows and “rare” movies that aren’t available anywhere.
Censoring in computer games. Here in Germany, a lot of games were censored aggressively when I was young, because God forbid the youth is able to play games in their original form! They will turn to the dark side when they see some red pixels! Politics got even worse when we had a school shooting incident (not that regular here) and the attacker played a video game.
A lot of games where either not available at all or we had robots, green blood or missing assets in them.
I also liked to listen to electronic music (still do), but I grew up in North-East Germany and the only radio stations here played pop, rock and old people music. Couldn’t tape techno music, was too poor to buy it (and too far away from a good store anyway), so I looked on the web and found a lot of great stuff.
I still remember the first online music stores, with horrible DRM and 128kbps WMA files…it was not a good time.
For a while I had Netflix and Spotify, almost didn’t pirate anything anymore. Then Spotify started draining my phone’s battery, they didn’t shuffle properly anymore and I got recommended songs that were definitely sponsored (fuck you, A State of Trance). Netflix lost a lot of content and we got many more streaming services in return. So here we are again.
A lot of games where either not available at all or we had robots, green blood or missing assets in them.
We even had that problem in the UK with Carmageddon. It wasn’t a problem to locate the correct files, though!
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.
For me it was the Simpsons when I was a kid and a relative would record it off satellite TV for me. It just carried on from there. I started recording stuff off TV myself, recording music on audio cassettes and eventually copying VHS tapes.
Then I got a PSX console and my parents “knew a guy” who burned games.
After that I heard about Napster and started downloading MP3s on the family PC. When Napster was shut down I moved onto other apps like Kazaa and Limewire.
Then I got a DVD burner. At first I just copied DVDs but when I got broadband I started downloading torrents and burned the files to DVDs.
About 10 years ago I started storing those files on a NAS. Planning on moving to Jellyfin in the next few weeks.
When i first started as a kid, i just wanted games, shows, movies and music without having to pay for it, as i would not be able to afford it all. First movies from P2P-clients like napster, kazaa and limewire. My older brother taught me what i needed to know to get started with torrenting later, and i built up a great ratio on 3-4 private trackers to get what i needed. This continued until soptify and netflix came along and i had some more cash on hand. The initial service was good enough for me to stop pirating.
So after about a decade of being a landlubber, i started pirating again. The services are fragmented, they treat you like shit and using any of their services is a privacy nightmare. As this dawned on me, i regretted having ever stopped pirating, because now i barely had any stuff at all. I didnt own a thing, and i did not like it. So now i had to spend a lot of time building up a library from (almost) scratch. I have a jellyfin-server running at home with about 600 movies and some of my old favorite shows, while also picking up some of the new stuff that i want. I dont have to sit thru all the bullshit on netflix to find a show/movie i like anymore, and the experience is pure bliss in comparison. Still lacking a bit in the music department, but that is also growing and i again enjoy some of the music i listened to before that is not available on spotify. I dont exclusively pirate though, i purchase some music of bandcamp, games of gog (and steam) and audiobooks of libro.fm.
Next time there is an enticing offer that does not involve downloadable drm-free files, im not falling for it. Fool me once etc etc
Gronk found fire. Gronk thought good idea. Gronk shared idea. Fire never belonged to Gronk. Idea never belonged to Gronk.
Subscriptions, subscriptions everywhere
Corporate greed.
Young and didn’t have any money. Certainly not enough to blow on movies or shows. Since then it’s been a jumping off point into learning more and more about computers. Networks, data transfer, Linux, virtual machines. I’m looking to get some certifications and get into IT now, and I probably wouldn’t have the knowledge to do so if I hadn’t spent my years on the high seas.
It’s all thanks to my older sister who pirated a lot of games for me including Garry’s mod back in like 2007 or so. She introduced me to uTorrent (that app is shitty as of right now, use qbtorrent.) which i am pretty excited for. This is like when i was 7 (I am 25 years old now) and before the ISP restrictions in the US, we pirated all sorts of games, movies, etc. What my sister used to do is we rent movies from blockbuster and my sis used to rip the movie files from the DVD to a burnt DVD-R. We would do that every time we rent a movie that i’ve liked.
She used to pirate music too as well as pirate episodes of Supernatural before AT&T gave her a bullshit cease and desist letter to her. Afterwards, she stopped pirating media and it makes me sad to see this happen to her. Luckily, at least direct downloads are better than torrents nowadays.
