Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

I don't really understand the gender difference thing, because I would think that in general it comes down to understanding what "ownership" is and that it has been taken from us, replaced with "licensing" where we have to buy the same movie every 10 years on a new format, and now that streaming is THE format, companies have made The Producers real, where they can make a whole movie, shitcan it, and get a tax break. We're dealing with items we've paid for being removed from our digital storage boxes, because the "rights ran out." It's wild, because it used to be that you bought a movie and it didn't matter that the rights ran out you could still watch your fucking movie in your own home. Same for old video games. If you have old copies of Grand Theft Auto, you can still listen to the great soundtrack, because they hadn't stripped the music they lost licensing for out of the new copies.

I mean, going back to when the music companies were suing music fans for downloading music, the RIAA sued Limewire for so much that if the max payout was given to every rightsholder for all the piracy going on, that it would be a bill larger than the amount of money that actually existed.[^1]

When the fines for all piracy that exists would be bigger than the amount of money that exists, its clear that the system is fucking broken and has been.

Nobody respects copyright, and that started when Disney fucked us all over with the Mickey Mouse Protection Act in the 1990's.

The rightsholders did this to themselves by making it increasingly draconian.

When cops are playing copyrighted music when they're being filmed so people can't post it online without it being auto-removed for having copyrighted music in it, things are flat out fucked and everybody knows it.

It's akin to living the end stages of the Soviet Union with Hypernormalization. Everything is totally fucked, but everyone is running around trying to pretend that nothing has changed and everything is fine.

For citizens who get nothing but working themselves to death and taxes that do nothing for them, piracy is one of those small "fuck you"'s that we can give to the rich.

[^1]: "The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) estimates that filesharing website LimeWire owes it over $72 trillion dollars (£46 trillion) in damages. ... Given that the combined wealth of the entire planet is around $60 trillion (£38 trillion), the RIAA likely has no hope of securing this in damages, but believe this is what it is owed, reports Computerworld.com."