Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Take it as a challenge and waste inordinate amounts of time finding it 'free'!

I'm rich, so I buy it, rip it and upload it to pirate bay.

Give up, it's all just entertainment for me, so i can just go and be entertained by something else.

You either die a leecher or live long enough to become the seeder

It's never really about the price, it's about the convenience.

Give up. I refuse to pay for artificially scarce goods.

This same applies to public transport tickets, end up either staying home or walking for hours so I don't have to pay for the damn tickets that should be free.

Cannot speak for anyone else, but it depends on his badly I want it and whether or not I am willing to give money to said compant/person/whatever.

Is it an old out of print game that suddenly had prices jacked up 500% by scalpers/scammers? It ain't worth me trying to find a ROM if the sources I like don't have it, nor buying it.

Is it from some indie dev/devs that probably don't have the financial stability to afford everyone pirating their game? I'm more likely to buy if I can afford.

Did a large company like Sintendo, Activision, etcetera, make it? For older titles, I am likely to buy if it's a low enough price and I have a real interest in it. Newer titles? I usually don't bother because the quality for most triple AAA studios isn't up to par for me since I don't like buying reskins of the same game with somehow less of the basic features available unless you pay.

Side note: looking forward to Black Ops 99 where you have to pay $9.99 per pixel to be able to see the screen as you play and still have people buy the game, willing to pay for every pixel... only to find out the game servers are constantly offline for an online only experience they don't get to play and by purchasing the game you somehow agreed to give Activision access to your bank account to do as they please with that money.

Edit:

For shows and movies, if I can't easily find it, I don't bother because it's a much bigger hassle than video game piracy. Same with books.

Depends on what it is... if it's a movie that I can't find, I'll usually just wait until an ethical version shows up somewhere later.

If it's a research paper or a book I'm looking for, though, I take paywalling as a personal insult - I usually go to extreme lengths to obtain it, and I usually do get it.

I usually give up or find a free alternative. Typically, if something is available at a good price I won't bother trying to get it free to begin with.

It's usually the opposite that's the issue for me. If it's not free, OK, let's pay, but if it's not a reasonable price for the product (including both the content, usability, and reusability, in case of media), then I'll go out of my way to get it free or totally give up on it depending on how much I want it. That's why I switched from piracy to Netflix for many years and now am back to piracy because I like shows in the background while working on projects, for example, or piracy, then Steam, then, fuck gaming as much because I found other hobbies.

It is very infrequent that I find myself needing a form of entertainment. Generally, when I am unable to find it on the high seas, it is entirely unobtainable through legal channels.

It is far more frequent that I find myself purchasing a thing I have previously pirated.

Piracy is typically my last resort. It means it's already unavailable under acceptable conditions.

The latter, because I don't have money

Keep searching , never ever give up .

Usually the second, which is the most common option, because we know objectively that studios are in fact not "losing" eleventy billion dollars to piracy. If that were true most people would choose the first.

I'm not buying the new Pokémon game. I'll play it on an emulator if it's not too much hassle. I don't have plans to ever buy it, and if it never works on emulation, I will just not play it.

In a different case, I've gone from pirating a bunch of games to buying them because I liked them and wanted the updates. BG3 for example.

Most of the stuff I want to pirate, is because they are expensively rare or not available through stores. Mind, that might change in the future, just because of how crap the US economy is becoming for the ordinary person.

I want to support cool stuff by paying, if the terms are reasonable. That means no DRM, all content, and an appropriate price. It is mostly hentai games that I am buying, since the developers of those definitely need the money.

This is exceedingly rare, but I would buy it and then share it with the world for free.

Depends. A while back, I was looking for an old, relatively obscure but unimportant album, and could only find one copy on eBay. It was only a couple bucks, so I bought it, ripped it, and uploaded it. Now it's preserved and available.

I also had an experimental EP album I downloaded from YouTube that I really enjoyed. At some point the author took it down, so I uploaded it to archive.org, again for preservation and availability. Later the author found it and commented something like "hey this is my work, what's it doing here", so I took it down. But I still have it and I'll put it back up when they stop making music.

If it was something easily available for a few bucks, I wouldn't publish it. Creators deserve compensation for their labor too. They need to eat. For something that they're charging way too much for, and they're not hurting for cash, especially if it's not easily available, yeah I wouldn't have a second thought about pirating and republishing it.

In your case, with the 99% availability, I'd try to complete the torrent and seed in any way possible. If that's not possible, I'd purchase and republish, filling in the missing files if possible or creating a new torrent if not.

If something is worth paying for I just do that up-front. (Outside of some exceptions where I actively don’t want to support the creator or license holder)

Depends on how much I want it.

For music, I buy the CDs (if I can) to support the artist.
But I also recently ripped my whole spotify playlist.

For other types of media, if it's not in the quality I want, and it's reasonable in price, I'll pay it.
Then I'll rip it and put it in my library.

During college, I got all my books online Zlib or LibGen and the small amount of times i couldn't find any I'd pay someone who had a PDF copy as my last ditch effort.

I'm not employed and have little to no money, so...