Asklemmy

I feel good seeing how the corpos squirm when trying their damndest to get rid of any pirating method (which is fair and what everyone in the world deserves free of charge by birth) only to be met with impossible tasks and fall flat on their faces. It's one of the better feelings in this world. I pirate everything, everywhere, unless I know I can help a talented (and actual) human out.

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 think what you might be referring to is the Paradox of Choice -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice

Ebooks often cost more than paper books, they're also easily pirate-able, mainly due to their small size, so my Kindle has almost... 600MB of wArEz

Pirated games some long time ago, if I liked it I bought it, it's a nice way to test how a game runs on my machine, there were almost no demos a few years ago, now more and more games have them, also you can test some of them with subscriptions like gamepass

Also streaming subscriptions are too fragmented, that IMO justices occasional piracy

When I was a broke-ass college student I pirated a lot of things. When I started working properly and finally had my own means, I started buying basically everything. Then the post-covid world brought a lot of changed to my life and income and I'm a little back on the piracy train.

There's a lot of factors, for me. If I want to support a product, I won't pirate it. I recently picked up Sea of Stars, because it's a small team indie title made with love, and it shows. Likewise, if I am on the fence about something for some reason, I may "demo" it first and if it keeps my attention, I'll end up buying it.

Sometimes there's past experiences that keep me off of some games. I strictly won't buy Ubisoft's PC releases, and haven't played an Assassin's Creed game in years because of that. After every debacle with them, between uPlay, account issues and the performance/quality of their PC ports, they just don't deserve my money.

i only pirate things that i do not "need" and i would not purchase no matter the price - typically movies and shows that are not on the streaming platforms i pay for.

if pirating that thing isn't an option, i'll just do without it. so in my eyes the creator is not losing any sales from me since i would not be paying for it in any scenario.

I want? I pirate. It loses no value. If the price is right I'll support smaller guys when I can, but shit is only getting more expensive, so I support less these days.

Shits getting expensive and I'm not getting richer. I think I'd be stupid to not pirate.

Shit really is getting expensive.

Yes.

When I feel like doing it.

Even assuming I were a billionaire, my guideline is: Company acts nice? Take my bucks. Scummy practices, fragmentation, region locking, etc? Sail the seas

I don't pirate video games. Steam, Gog, or even epic are easy and not too expensive. Steam's refund policy isnt terrible.

I don't pirate music. I buy stuff from smaller artists on Bandcamp, and use free Spotify/YouTube/old stuff I ripped myself from CDs (I'm old). Though honestly I don't have a problem with pirating music that's like 10+ years old. Copyright law is too long.

I don't pirate books. I get them from the library.

I may have downloaded some RPG books because I wanted more of a skim than I could find online, didn't really trust reviewers to have my exact set of preferences, and didn't want to pay the whole amount for a game I wasn't sure I'd like. The ones I did like and use I bought.

I don't really watch anything so it didn't even occur to me to list it.

I pirate a ton of stuff, but I also see more movies in theaters than most people I know. I'm lucky enough to live in a place that still has an awesome local video store that has a ton of hard to find, obacure films. Like shaw brothers kung fu films, or documentaries like Jefftowne.

It is noble and dare i say, even cool and funny to download (evilly).

Specifically for books I pirate because I get a better product this way. I prefer reading on my phone and downloading an epub means I can open it in any app I want, add chapters and share it with whoever I want. If I could easily pay for a book and get the same experience without any drm or online account bullshit I would probably do it.

Physical books are also ok but buying anything not in my language means possibly waiting forever for it to arrive and paying more for transit costs. I may still do it if I really want to support the author but I'd rather have a way to pay them directly tbh.

I have pirated some opera video recordings. It's the only way I'd see some of them. I don't know how to pirate TV or music, and I'd never pirate music anyway because I care a lot about music.