I’ve begun discontinuing many US services in favor of EU ones. However, I’ve noticed that some individuals, instead of simply ceasing to use American products, resorted to illegally downloading everything. While it’s true that the money goes to the US when you pay, it can’t justify disrespecting others’ hard work and effort while still consuming or using their products, and it is also illegal. This is especially true considering that they likely don’t have any direct connection to MAGA. This applies to actors, directors, YouTubers, and many others. We should simply cease using their products without giving them any further consideration.
Edit: adding to the last line, we should give instead more attention to locally and European made creations and products
If you want to get your favourite Linux distro anonymously, then you can torrent it via i2p.
Always had been
piracy is ethical with only small exceptions like when the content is produced by a low income author/artist
I think actual artists get virtually nothing from streaming services. If you find art that you do like, considering directly supporting the artists. For example, go to a musical artists live show or buy merch from their website. I’m sure their are better ideas out there.
Don’t forget that the EU Commission funded a report to document the impact of file sharing and then buried it when they found out that it was actually beneficial to the creators. So if you want to engage in file sharing, you’re actually helping them.
Do what you will with that information. If you really want to boycott, then boycott the content altogether. If you can’t hold back, then download them, but you’re helping them out anyway by doing that.
The best thing you can do is support your local art scene and find better alternatives.
Piracy isn’t stealing because you don’t take the original away from the creator, you just create a copy which doesn’t detract at all from the original copy. In fact, copyright is more a tool for stealing than piracy, as large corporations will get small creators to sign over the rights to the content they created, consolidating ‘ownership’ rights in the hands of a bunch of greedy corporations (Disney, Microsoft, etc) rather than the people that actually created them.
I bet you wouldn’t be happy if something you made and that you’re trying to sell get copied and shared completely for free. Many people would use that without giving you a penny. It is not stealing in a stricter sense, but it would hurt your finances for sure.
I wouldn’t try to sell information. Physical products, services, support, sure. But you can’t sell information which has no scarcity. Maybe you could pay for someone to create something they otherwise wouldn’t have, but not for something that already exists.
To play devil’s advocate, would you be happy if you spent a long time writing a novel and as soon as you published it a company copied all the text and started printing cheap copies, or just releasing free ebooks of it? As far as I’m aware that’s what IP law is “supposed” to protect against.
If I wrote a book, I would release free epub files myself.
And this is the same logic that big companies are using when they rip off small scale creators to feed their AI algorithms.
The argument is more nuanced than “it isn’t stealing because it is just copying”.
With the AI stuff, they are not just copying the work, they are stealing small creators livelihoods as well as the efforts of their labour.
I know, it’s cool to say the catch phrase, “of buying isn’t owning, pirating isn’t stealing”, but ultimately this benefits the massive mega corporation’s more than the little guys.
To add (kinda what you said but from slightly different angle)
Intellectual property is a crime.
Just think about it, just because someone was first to fill the paper work for an idea means you have to ask their permission to express any similar idea you had yourself.
If you want to support creators there are other ways which are often more direct without middle men taking a cut.
Honestly, framing the whole thing as “disrespecting hard work and effort” sounds suspiciously like American anarchocapitalist nonsense.
Me watching or buying stuff is not a relationship and does not express support, respect or anything other than a commercial transaction. When I want to express support I express support (primarily by voting) and when I express disapproval I express disapproval (primarily by voting for people who will properly regulate your whole deal into submission).
I don’t express myself with money, I express myself with political action, thank you very much.
This is something that I wrestle with. There are certain companies I don’t want to spend money with, but I want to support the work and the crews who work on those things.
The argument is my money doesn’t go to the crews. But my time spent watching adds to the metrics that gets these shows and albums greenlit, but ultimately it comes down to how you feel about those quandaries.
I make games for a living so I feel that supporting is best for me. If no one bought the games I worked on I couldn’t feed my son. Instead I’m making more conscious decisions about where and how I spend my money. I just switched to Proton for my email, I use Kagi for search. I support teams I care about and support services I believe in. I buy games I want to play. I don’t think too much about the other things.
If a show is not available in my country easily, I do pirate. That’s kinda the only thing I pirate these days.
2 day old account.
We’ve had big spikes in sign-ups recently, I don’t want to discourage new people from being active posters.
Starting?
Not at all related, where can you find cheap hard drives in europe?
Your local computer shop, most likely. If it’s run by some old guy with a soldering shop hosting his website on his own little server in the back room of the shop they’re probably the best, speaking from experience here (NL)
As for the Netherlands,
tweakers .comtweakers.net their price watch has a decent database of competing prizes across Dutch web shops, even smaller ones!
To anyone reading this, please let me know if there’s websites like this for other European countries!Thanks, but I don’t have any shops lkke that nearby. The link tweakers.com doesn’t seem to work.
Edited, it’s supposed to be tweakers.net
I usually reach their website using DuckDuckGo’s
!tweakersbang like so: Demo linkThanks!
