Yo ho ho removed.

I once was wearing my music pirate tee, with a skull wearing head phones, while walking in public in the city (Chicago). I was in a light crowd crossing the street and this traffic cop gave me the dirtiest goddamn look I've ever seen lol

3 words.

Stand.

And.

Deliver.

I'll admit to being mostly right of center in a lot of ways gasp HERE??! Lol.

But I'm no boot licker.

Anarchocapitalist is probably the closest category.

That said, there's nothing I like more than fighting back against "the man" whether that "man" is a corporation or the government itself.

So when corporations, or anyone really, tries to fuck me over?

Stand. And. Deliver. removed.

I turn 49 in August. I've had a home computer since 1984. I am of the generation that could work on the old school computers, and I've been pirating since the 80s.

If you want me to PAY you, make it worth the money. Otherwise, I'll get it however I can get away with.

Piracy is terrible, but there are very few places in the world where it still exists, like Somali.

I think it’s good :)

I am conflicted about it.

I was a teenager in the 90s and piracy back then was new and was an act of rebellion, a fuck you to copyright assholes and a way to stick it to The Man (whatever that means).

Now I think more about the damage that it could cause to creators and developers, but also I don't like to support predatory and exploitative platforms, so I could say I have become more selective with my piracy, and whenever I think it's fair, I will pay for the thing I have pirated if I like it/find it useful/think the price is fair.

Make your own Netflix 7GB (size of one hour 4k HDR content) * 3 (hours) * 30.5 (Average days in a month) = 640.5 GB

A good, new, brand name 20TB drive costs ~$300, that's $15 per TB.

Thats $9 a month. When your drives are full just buy another drive.

Add $20 for a usenet sub, VPN, another maybe $5 at most for other hardware.

I think it is unethical to pay (or demand payment) for things that can be copied freely. It's a joke, insanity, a depraved legacy/necessity from the Blue Church.

It’s a good way to get your data stolen/malware. Don’t get me wrong from 10-18 I used pirated software exclusively. But it’s not secure or a good idea at all if you’re going to use, say, banking or crypto stuff. You can get a winblows key from a reseller for like $15-20USD. I personally wouldn’t mess around with any of it anymore. I got a bunch of cool art programs in a bundle for I think $25 ($400 usd value) that I use now, and before that I used Krita.

It's not so easy to answer if piracy is ethical, depends of the context. It's not the same soft from a shady company and from a small dev team or startup. Anyway, due to the overhelming amount of free alternatives, piracy in most of the cases isn't necessary. I'm using an PC since almost 30 years now and never had the need to piracy an soft or pay for it. There are tons of free and OpenSource soft and services out ther, often better as the commercial ones, giveaway campaigns in games (Steam, Itch.io, DigiPen and others are full of good free games) and soft, free music (Bandcamp, Pixelfed, FMA,,,,,), etc. only needs to search a little.

Personally, I think piracy is a tool of the desperate, the disheartened and those that don't care for awarding merit. The desperate if a software is too hard to come by legitimately, the disheartened as a form of protest if the software/company has draconian practices at play, and those that don't award merit because they would, if not never, at least rarely buy/rent anything if not forced to.

FOSS is nice and all, but do mind people are expending their time in such projects, so if you think a project is good and you can afford it, I'd suggest supporting financially the creators.