# "Piracy"

Piracy is a [capitalist](capitalism.md) propaganda term for the act of illegally sharing copyrighted information such as [non-free](proprietary.md) books, movies, music, video [games](game.md) or scientific papers.

It is greatly admirable to support piracy, however also keep in mind the following: if you pirate a [proprietary](proprietary.md) piece of information, you get it gratis but it stays proprietary, it abuses you, it limits your freedom -- you won't get the source code, you won't be able to publicly host it without being bullied, you won't be allowed to legally create and share derivative works etc. Therefore **prefer [free (as in freedom)](free_culture.md) alternatives to piracy**, i.e. pieces of [information](information.md) that are not only gratis but also freedom supporting.

Despite the term itself being recent, the concept of "piracy" is nothing new; it's essentially as old as the concept of "intellectual ownership" itself. Famous paintings have been copied by "pirate artists" and sold as being the original. Mozart, thanks to his genius, famously copied sheet of music that was supposed to remain unpublished just from hearing the piece played.

At the dawn of personal computer era, the culture of [hackers](hacking.md) who helped with pirating software by creating [cracks](crack.md) spawned the [demoscene](demoscene.md), a hugely significant [art](art.md) subculture based on programming technically impressive audiovisual presentations. The fuss around piracy also influences mainstream culture, e.g. the infamous "you wouldn't steal a car" anti-piracy propaganda that was present on VHS movie tapes is now a laughable piece of failed [capitalist](capitalism.md) attempt at trying to invoke a sense of guilt of sharing -- many people happily pirated and pirate to this day and they also happily admit to piracy; in fact many old movies and otherwise historically significant media has been preserved only thanks to people pirating. One paper from 2020s found that men (curiously unlike [women](woman.md)) exposed to anti-piracy propaganda will increase their pirating by 18% :D One example of publicly embracing piracy in the mainstream is e.g. the [Pirate party](pirate_party.md) that has risen to popularity in a few countries now.

{ Where to pirate stuff? See e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/wiki/megathread and https://piracy.vercel.app. ~drummyfish }

TODO: history, pirate bay etc.