You cannot select more than 25 topics Topics must start with a letter or number, can include dashes ('-') and can be up to 35 characters long.

2.4 KiB

"Piracy"

Piracy is a capitalist propaganda term for the act of illegally sharing copyrighted information such as non-free books, movies, music, video games or scientific papers.

It is greatly admirable to support piracy, however also keep in mind the following: if you pirate a proprietary 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) alternatives to piracy, i.e. pieces of information 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 Mozart, thanks to his genius, famously copied sheet of music that was supposed to remain unpublished just from hearing the piece played.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 who helped with pirating software by creating cracks spawned the demoscene, a hugely significant art 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 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) 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 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.