Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Zero. I only download Linux ISOs.

After a very intensive calculations session, I come up with at least 7$.

$0. I would not have any it if I didn't pirate it. I was never going to spend any money.

nice try Interpol!

This was tricky, but I estimate about $3.50

This kind of thinking is what the mpaa and others want pirating framed as. Very very little of what's pirated would have been paid for at all had it not been available. I've paid to see sequels for movies that have pirated and have bought books based on series I've downloaded that I never would have bothered to explore if I had to buy them originally.

Nice try, glowie

Nice try, FBI

Zero because I don't have to do anything.

Does this include media I grabbed but literally never opened or looked at?

Does a WoW subscription count? I've played on private servers for a looooong time, that alone would've been some 20+ months of sub.

It's tricky for me to estimate because the majority of my piracy happened around 2004-14, so lots of stuff I don't remember, plus some of the games I pirated back then I ended up buying later on at a discount (Jazz Jackrabbit, SupCom, UT2004, X3TC). I still don't own a legal copy of Age of Empires 2, so you can add that one to my debt.

Oh, that reminds me, if I add the many, many, MANY emulated roms to that list, boy, that'll be a lot of debt. Some 500 games times ~40 dollars average, that's 20k.

There are also the many anime episodes that simply didn't exist as available for purchase, so "at original price" I guess it'd be zero.

Pirscy has its negatives, anything ive spent money on ive been compelled to use, piracy ill build up a library of barely touched software, doing myself a disservice not learning/using them, but they feel less imporrtant if they can be gotten free, only really applies to the initial learning phase but most stuff I pirate I dont get past that phase

This is tough to answer, because a lot of pirated stuff is literally priceless, i.e., can't be bought at all.

I'd be happy to pay for the recent Ace Combat 5 and 6 upscaled ports, but they were only available briefly with preorders for AC7 on consoles I don't have. They haven't been sold outside of that brief window several years ago. Even if you tracked down unopened copies from 2019 and bought them from third parties, the license codes they contained expired long ago.

Fortunately, the Ace Combat community has put a lot work into making emulation work. The older games are playable, just not in a way you can pay money for.

There's a lot of stuff that you can't even buy now.

About -5000, where can I collect, FBI?

Probably not that much. I ended up buying most of the games I pirated anyway. For me, it was because of sheer poverty.

These days, I don't care enough about games to bother anymore.

Or, I own the media already, and just want an easy-ready version that I can video edit without having to fuss over decoders and crap.

Infinite money. Capital wants infinite money for their imaginary property in perpetuity. Otherwise they'll get their state to put you in a cage.

Jfc, I can't even calculate.

Music, if we say 10 bucks a CD, at least 10k. Probably closer to 20k, and maybe more because I haven't actually counted in years because I didn't see the point in trying to keep up. However, I just went and looked at the folder on my nas and it has 1k+ albums on it, and that's way less than is on my main drive on my media PC. So even the 20k estimate is a lot lower than what's actually there. Likely closer to the $50k mark if my memory is right. I tend to grab whole albums rather than individual tracks only, and I'm prone to grabbing an entire discography when I discover a new band. My music collection is around 2tb total, I know that without looking.

Movies, even at the same price, it would be around the 8k mark somewhere, though they aren't all in one place, so I cant be certain. There's a little over 1k files on the nas, but that's only the ones that everyone wanted available on there.

Books, I'm fucked. Call it 5 bucks for a cheap paperback, and I'm close to 10k, if not over. Hard to be sure because I do have duplicates in multiple formats. I've whittled down to only "borrowing" epub files and converting on my own if someone borrows an ebook from me and wants a different format, but I've never gone through and deleted mobis and whatnot. But it's around 3k files on my boox reader, plus more on my nas drive that I really only keep because I like having access to some reference materials but don't use them often enough to justify keeping them on devices. So 15k there, at that price.

I just checked because I was curious. Almost 18k files of ebooks. That, however, does include classics that I only read occasionally, copies in multiple formats, stuff that isn't for me (kid, wife, etc), and probably some stuff that I read once and never will again, but didn't delete. So, over 50,000 bucks at 5 bucks each.

Comics, that's easier because a scanned version doesn't really have a monetary value at all, and most of my collection is of OOP stuff. So, depending on how you look at what a price should be, it's $0, maybe 600 bucks at $1 each, or you'd have to track cover prices on all of it, and I ain't doing that lol.

Tbh, I can't think of the last time I pirated a game. I just don't game that much on my desktop any more, and I know I haven't in the 10 odd years I've had that specific hard drive.

If I tried to factor in stuff that was higher priced at some point (and CDs used to be pretty expensive), numbers would go up.

Shit. Even if I wiped out the stuff I have physical copies of, it would still be in the 100k range I think.

I've pirated books that are so rare their used copies cost hundreds of euros. Also there are the English academic publications, which have insane prices even by default, and boy do I love hoarding them. In general, I've pirated so much I have no idea how I'd even go about estimating the theoretical total cost.

OTOH I've also recently been thinking about how much money I have spent on legally obtaining media, going to concerts and film screenings and plays and exhibitions and everything else... Should be solidly in the four-digit area.

Pay what? A physical copy? A digital license for streaming on a platform? A digital rental? A month of streaming service that includes it? Taking free access and public libraries (like public broadcasting libraries), temporary or time-limited into account? There's way too much variance to make any reasonable assessment on this.

To get an idea of price variance, even without monthly services, which make individual consumption cheaper still, let's look at the value of digital products on Steam.

Comparing my Steam account value calculated by SteamDB, the "lowest value" is 23% of the "value today". Taking into account that prices reduce significantly over time, you could put it much lower.

How do you expect people to calculate "if you had to pay for every item"?

By this point I would have to have Luigi'd about three CEOs to be able to pay all the stuff via collecting the contracts.

Hi FBI. I will just say 5000 seems crazy low though, especially if you're assuming a movie is $20-$30 and a game is like $10-$80. Dunno how you'd calculate tv shows but dvd/bluray seasons/box sets can get real expensive fast.

Does it count if you barely watched/played it?

How would you calculate tv shows that have being broadcasted

Somewhere in the ballpark of 7 million

There are games like Divinity Original Sin 2 that were so good I bought them after I finished them. So.. hard to tell.

I rarely actually pirate anything. The only time I pirate is when I'm otherwise forced to go through that specific company to do the things I want due to monopoly shit.

Used to pirate windows before switching to Linux (I still give people I know helpful tips on the process though, not everybody can make the switch yet). Used to pirate MS office and a couple other pieces of software back when I had to use them for school. I would pirate substance painter if a Linux crack was available, but I haven't been able to find one and I can't get the windows version working, so I simply don't use that software. And as for shows and movies, that whole mess of subscriptions, yeah I don't watch pretty much any of it. I buy physical copies when possible and watch stuff with friends who have the services. I use bandcamp for most of my music, sometimes YouTube for discovering new stuff.

I will however keep up to date on all of the piracy methods because i will not be caught helpless by some shitty company who thinks it's found a way to corner me.

Fuck off Fed Boi.

As a compulsive datahoarders, millions, more ? It really depends if you include only stuff I actively enjoyed, or just each single instance of a copy I made, every torrent I've seeded.

None I think. I paid for all my streaming services that had these movies and shows and then have sourced everything else through originals or sources that were rentable.

This is that whole issue with defining ownership with digital media. Movies were called the greatest financial invention of America because they only had to make a product once and could sell it forever.
With digital media and technology increases we now have a much easier time owning our own copies.

This is likely literally what NFTs hoped to fix to make set revenue of of each digital file and also why they failed because they are so easy to copy anyways.

So, none, or an infinite amount, depending on if you ask me or a business major.

If I can't own it, I'm not buying it.

A lot. Though it's hard to put a price on some things because they're software for discontinued products ( old game consoles, Amiga software, etcetera ) and aren't sold as they were, even if some of them are still sold for other platforms.

Depends. Do we count in-app purchases of apps I've modded or obtained pre-modded? Do we count the cost of films as one-off rentals/purchases, or do we count them as subscriptions?

If we consider games as buying one-off licences for them that I kept in perpetuity, it would be in the few hundreds, probably about £400.

If we include streaming, as a subscription service that I've used for the last decade roughly, then 10×12×£10 (assuming a tenner a month), we're looking at £1,200 saved for streaming.

However, at least 20-30 films have been downloaded by me personally, so assuming a cost of about a fiver per film (idk how much films go for these days), we're looking at another ~£700.

But also, we have to include ad-free YouTube as YT Premium. And even if we're to assume that YT Premium is anywhere close to the service I provide myself with, i.e downloading things I actually keep as digital files forever, it would still cost a lot. About 5 years of YT Premium would be (according to ChatGPT because I didn't want to research price increases), just over £800.

But I've also watched both Netflix and Disney+ exclusives, namely Squid Game and The Mandalorian, so I guess streaming would've been much more expensive?

Also, we have about a year of Spotify, which ChatGPT (easier to give more accurate estimates) claims is just over £140.

Adding to that, apparently the cost of Netflix over the same period is just over £1,500, so that changes the total.

So far, £3500, not counting in-app purchases in modded games. If we count that (which is ridiculous cuz I would never spend that much money on games, even if I was a liquid trillionaire (meaning having £1T cash)), we'd probably be looking at something in the hundreds of thousands if not millions.