Well, my friend, he’s kinda poor he can’t afford some books and some streaming services, so he pirates. He pirate books, audiobook and videos and other stuff. Sometimes he buys books he likes a lot out of loyalty to the author (yeah, I don’t understand it either), he likes to read physical books, but yeah, if he hates the author or just wants to skim through it, he will download the book.
He usually doesn’t like to pirate from small companies or professors who are trying to make a living by selling books, but from millionaires & plenty of mega corps which already have loads of money, he feels like it’s the right move to pirate
Also, have you ever noticed that you have felt that the value of a product has decreased just because you didn’t pay for it, thus you are less interested to read it? i.e., had you paid for the book, you would have more likely read that book.
He says he will buy stuff when his time is more valuable than money, let’s all hope that day is soon.
What are your piracy habits?
Great reply :). I definitely agree, and do understand that libraries contribute to sales and can make or break books from certain authors. And I also agree that it feels different when buying something from a massive greedy corporation vs something from a smaller production where the creator probably isn’t making millions of dollars, and might be kind of struggling. I’m definitely not saying I condone these authors and creators starving or these works not being able to be created in the first place because piracy might make them unprofitable. I absolutely think that’s a bad thing! But at the same time I do think it’s a shame we can’t freely distribute these works with all of the amazing tools we have, and it’s a shame we’re losing the right to loan and resell things with digital media. It makes me wish we had some giant government digital library that paid for things with taxes (I mean… arguably this is just a library, but the restrictions and DRM on digital lending are depressing) or universal income or something so this was more feasible. Obviously neither of these would be perfect solutions, but I can’t help but feel like there’s a better way.
Just wanted to clarify, I’m not necessarily saying that we should pirate things and have authors starve or whatever. I guess I just don’t think it’s as simple as saying “piracy is immoral / moral”, I think it depends on the context and on what the overall economic system is, and I like to believe that we could live in a world without artificially imposed digital scarcity and where sharing is a virtue and not a sin.