It doesn't matter if it's a CD, a Film, or manual with the instructions to build a spaceship. If you copy it, the original owner doesn't lose anything. If you don't copy it, the only one missing something (the experience) is YOU.
Enjoy!
Of course, if you happen to have some extra money for donations to creators, please do so. If you don't have that, try contributing with a review somewhere or recommending the content, spread the word. Piracy was shown to drive businesses in several occasions by independent and biased corps (trying to show the opposite).
Devil’s advocate: “If you copy it, the [original] owner doesn’t lose anything…”
They loose the right to distribute it or not distribute it to who they choose. As the owner, it’s technically their right to deny access to the work, and you are taking that right away from them.
I’m not a shill, and I am never going to be a customer of big media. If I can’t get it without charge, I’d rather go without. But, I am taking that right away from the owner. I sleep ok.
It terrifies me how much effort piracy communities spend on absolving themselves from immorality by projecting it onto other pirates. No one cares about how broken IP law is, they just care about having the moral high ground. And so the laws continue to get more and more broken.
We're all breaking the law (at least in certain jurisdictions). If morality is tied to law, none of us are moral. And when the law comes for pirates, it doesn't care about our petty divisions.
If you want to protect yourself (and creators for that matter), don't attack each other. Attack unjust laws and systems that deny creators fair compensation.
Piracy has always been stealingᵢ. Violently. Using ships, or boatsᵢᵢ.
What you're calling “piracy” — falling into the “intellectual property” mafia's trap by borrowing their malicious misnomer — is just plain old sharing.
Copying what we like (sometimes changing and adding our own ideas to it) and sharing it with other people, so they can like, share, and change it too.
It's how human culture works and has always worked!
Copyright (another intentional misnomer, since all it does is restrict the right to copy — and share, and modify — cultural works) is, at least in its current form, not only detrimental to culture (and its spread and preservation) but an attack on human nature itself.
As for the hypothetical profits we are supposedly “stealing”, paraphrasing Neil Gaiman, sharing not only doesn't cause a loss on profits, it increases themᵥ. It's free advertising.
It's not about profits. It's not about authors' rights. It's never been. It is, and has always been, about control. About deciding who and when can have access to culture, and who can't. When we can be human, and when we are not allowed to.
I — Well, sometimes mostly murdering, I suppose, if there was not enough to steal; and of course there was the whole letters of marque thing, which made it political and complicated. But mostly stealing, OK?
II — It being on navigable water is what distinguishes it from pillaging, if I'm not mistaken.
III — In the borrowed words of Sir Terry Pratchettᵥᵢ, “The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens ('wise man'). In any case it's an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.”; sharing stories, and any other form of culture, is what distinguishes us from other species. It's what makes us human.
IV — And even before. “IP” wranglers have a long history of not being reliable custodians of the cultural works they claim responsibility for, and sharing has many times been the only way to preserve said works after their (often malicious) mismanagement.
V — There's studies, too, if Gaiman's account is too anecdotal for your liking.
Using the term "piracy", instead of "filesharing", was always pro-corporate framing. In his 2010 essay "Ending the War on Sharing", Richard Stallman wrote:
When record companies make a fuss about the danger of "piracy", they're not talking about violent attacks on shipping. What they complain about is the sharing of copies of music, an activity in which millions of people participate in a spirit of cooperation. The term "piracy" is used by record companies to demonize sharing and cooperation by equating them to kidnaping, murder and theft.
At this point digitally downloading things needs to just stop being called piracy and start being called digital archival. WiFi went down, luckily I have my digital archive.
All the people who made the content already got paid for their hours in large media. If you're pirating from a studio that is 1 to 10 people you probably know that and probably know it's lame. The money we're paying to view/listen is literally just the corporation trying to "make money back", even though the CEO and execs are probably a few tonnes richer than the rest of us, and the regular working class is getting paid hourly.
We've really got to be moving away from restricting knowledge, honestly even the idea of a $/hr type thing. Imaging being charged 15c every time you heard 40 seconds of a song or TV show. I like the idea of artists being paid royalties but our current system is such a scam with us, the core creator, getting hardly anything after the corporations get their cut. FFS, audiobook producers get more share of royalties than musicians do (most audiobooks are ~40% royalty share and musicians are lucky to get 25%.
It's hard as an artist. I want to be able to make money off my music, and be able to live from just that. The very real reality is that piracy (digital archival) would have almost ZERO affect on me due to the scale of it. People would be more likely to hear about me through its word of mouth than they are currently trying to buy my music with my advertising (none). I'm also not making music for money, but so that it can be listened to. Making money from it is more of a benefit than the goal, despite how nice it would be to do nothing but make music.
So, really, if I am hardly affected by people archiving my work, why in the fuck would HBO be? And if it were true, why would they remove hundreds of movies and shows from their service, lost forever. How are the royalties from those being lost when I archive it?
No, there is none.
There is only one reason to not digitally archive something. One alone.
Metrics.
If you like something and you want it to survive, fucking pay to watch it. I love It's Always Sunny. I have all of it archived, and mostly watch it there. But I will put money into Hulu once in a while just to stream Sunny, for the new season, for whatever. Because those guys have more hours of my life than any other show, and I want them to be able to continue making it, and they can only do that if FX sees that enough people watch them to justify continuing. I don't agree with everything Hulu does, like their showing ads for networks even on the "Ad free" tier (the network contracted for it, which leads me to wonder when other networks won't leverage for the same deal), and something else that I had on my mind but just escaped me due to the late hour. Those guys all already got paid, the crew and teams, everything is taken care of. But for another season to happen enough people have to have seen it on a platform that matters to them, so the only thing that really matters is the metrics.
Of course, if you're HBO even that doesn't matter and it can be all thrown out anyway... so...
If you say it's taking something away from the original owner then you're right, but if you say it's not paying your share of the costs of a good you're using then you're wrong. E.g. if you go to a concert and don't pay the entrance fee then the concert will probably still happen, but you're not reimbursing the artists and crew for their costs and effort.
Who cares? Why the reach for moral superiority? I don't have an issue with stealing IP. Because the concept of IP is stupid. But I'm not going to rub myself off over what to call it.
Of course, if you happen to have some extra money for donations to creators, please do so. If you don’t have that, try contributing with a review somewhere or recommending the content, spread the word.
Why would you bother unless you feel you've taken something from the creator that you feel you need to atone for in some way? If you don't feel you stole it, you surely don't owe the creators anything, you deserve the content you attained without payment just the same as someone that paid money for the same content.
I used to make music with a band. We had studio rent, transportation costs, etc. We would mostly break even on gigs between all our expenses. In the rare event we profited from a gig, it went back into the band. As a whole, we were losing money.
If someone pirated the music that I spent hours working on in the space I paid rent for, I am absolutely losing a sale that could really have helped me out and, with enough of them, even let us maybe do it full time. I was always fine with people wanting to try before buying, but liking and listening to the music we spent a ton of time and money to make and not paying me anything is shitty as a small band. Your argument basically ends with "BuT WE'rE PaYinG You In ExPOSure!!!!" which is always shit.
Such a shallow take, I think if you can’t afford the commercial software then there’s a whole ecosystem of FOSS you should be using instead. Way too much outstanding free software in the world to bother with piracy! My two cents is I don’t want to go anywhere that I’m not welcome, and if you can’t bother to pay the devs then you’re probably not welcome
Keep huffing that copium. Everyone knows piracy is at best a morally grey area in our modern capitalist society. Some of us accept that and pirate anyway, others need to hide behind word definitions because they can't live with the idea that they're not the good guy.