Piracy is bad.
Piracy is bad.
It is illegal and immoral. It steals the rightful intellectual property of directors and developers who are only trying to make a living. If you want to be a thief so badly, then rob a federal bank.
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I'm a big fan of paying the people who make things for me.
But digital piracy is the only thing keeping archive copies of obscure media around today. Even libraries aren't keeping up. Plenty of media creators have revived their thing that found an audience after decades forgotten - through piracy, and only successfully revived it thanks to archivist pirates, since they had thrown that thing away.
It's not black and white.
Patronage funding, early access, streamlined delivery, and white glove support are the funding models that are working for creatives today.
speaking of libraries, there is also a need for archiving knowledge and information for the public good, such as books and research articles. Especially the latter are usually created and, many times, already paid for by the researchers themselves (often via tax money), many of whom would prefer to have their research disseminated.
In the global north, many universities can afford such high-priced publisher premium. But in the global south, and many underfunded universities, hospitals, schools in general, such prices are impossible. So in practicality, they turn to piracy for the most part.
That's even worse. Stealing from small creators. I don't see how active archiving relates to piracy, nor its connection to fan service.
The Internet Archive, even outside of their Wayback Machine, is effectively built on digital piracy in many ways if anything. The reality is that any sort of media, whether it's physical media that was destroyed, or digital media that was deleted or had it's host platform shut down, could possibly never be accessed again unless it's archived, even if that archival was done with piracy.
Mother 3 could be considered impossible to play legally in many ways, with most of the cartridges being sold unofficially with the English ROM hack being preapplied, and the originals starting near 75 dollars on eBay, and Nintendo isn't making any money off it anymore, so in many cases unless you're a collector, it's best to just pirate the game with an English ROM translation.
The Internet Archive also has an archived online library of books that you're free to borrow from, similar to an Overdrive-like platform of sorts, which is great for finding information that isn't publicly available, or to read a book that is simply rare used and not sold anymore or where another copy isn't to be found.
I don't see the comparison. Archiving is beneficial for the freedom of information, but pirating is beneficial for the pirate.
What I just said was that archiving for preservation often is done with piracy. You need to get the content one way or another to archive, especially with the vast library on there.
Yes, you pay the author.
Which is sometimes not even an option offered and sometimes licencing rules will mean that no matter how many people pay for it, it's going to be lost to the world without piracy.
Btw, it's cute that you think it's the author you're supporting, rather than the exploitative and greedy publisher. Downright adorable! 🥹
Archiving digital media is making backups and copies. That is what archiving those things is intrinsically, immutably.
Making backups and copies is also what the IP owners would refer to as piracy.
You cannot be pro-internet-archive and anti-piracy at the same time, at least not fully. They are contradictory positions.
You got that from my post? I no longer think you're engaging in a meaningful discussion here.