What things do you refuse to pirate?
Which seas do you avoid?
Which seas do you avoid?
Software. 99% of the time there is some Free Software alternative that either somehow does the job for my personal tasks, or is better anyways.
i refuse to pirate indie games. i will always buy games that are independently released or from small publishers because 1. they're just trying to break even (unlike publishers like EA and Activision who have millions of fans lining up to buy their repetitive junk) and 2. they almost never have DRM. i'll also buy my music for similar reasons; 99% of artists can barely make a living and i really do not want to contribute to that statistic
Apps. I prefer foss apps. I donate, report, contribute and spread the word.
Even if I would pirate an app it wouldn't become open source. I couldn't contribute. I couldn't report bugs, suggest ideas, fork and apply my own stuff.
I only pirate apps with no alternatives and very aggressive monetization like 100€/year subscriptions....
We've had a no piracy rule over in the Android subs/communities for years and the funny thing is, by time we ever got to someone trying to post a pirated APK the community themselves tore them a new arsehole.
Easiest rule to enforce when the community will absolutely hiss at you. Love em.
edit: a fun talking point I suppose is YouTube, and its app. We got a lot of people arguing that Newpipe 'was piracy' and I even had many debates with other members/mods about is it, or isn't it piracy?
My view it's a website that you can parse even with other tools like yt-dl, and if Youtube.com wanted to stop use of Newpipe / Revanced whatever they could in the blink of an eye.
I had to 'pirate' geometry dash apk as only the lite version was on the play store. I'd already payed for the full version on Steam and iOS.
I kinda pirated Spotify (xmanager). I believe Tidal is one I would actually subscribe too if I had the income.
It's not that I won't but I do try to go out of my way to support smaller artists I enjoy, especially nowadays.
Lucky it's gotten a lot easier with sites like Bandcamp, but it's better if I can buy directly from the bands own store.
Sad news about band camp from last year though.
Pretty much anything that I can buy easily without going to second-hand or stupid subscriptions. For me, it's really a service problem, not a cost problem.
As long as they participate in Steam sales, assuming they're on Steam to begin with, PC games are more convenient to have in a library where I don't have to manually update each game. Valve's not perfect, with its 30% cut of sales being arguably too high (as is the case for all other platforms that defend its use as being an "industry standard"), but given Nintendo's monetization of online gameplay and replacing the Virtual Console system with what is essentially console library rentals, I don't mind putting up with updating Switch ROMs once in a blue moon if it means not supporting anti-consumer practices. Any games I had in my Switch library that are also on Steam I simply repurchased for the sake of convenience, however.
30% allowing to use: Steam servers, Steam Workshop, Steam Cloud, Steamworks, Steam API
All of this is free for the players and developers they got to find a way to pay for all of this.
Considering that Valve makes more money per employee than most major tech companies, it definitely seems like it would still be turning a profit if its share of sales were reduced to 15 or 20 percent. Steam's services aren't free; the 30% fee inflates the price of games by 43%. As with any company Valve needs to have a high enough profit margin to cover long-term costs and R&D budgets, but the 30% cut is an outdated industry standard from when server operating costs were substantially higher than today.
Well I don’t know the internal details but looking at all the benefits and services provided to the developers and players this doesn’t seem unfair.
Aside from hosting cloud saves and Steam workshop data, there aren't many other services that justify a high fee to offset long-term costs. Steam trading cards, for instance, are just another source of revenue for Valve given that they also take a cut of sales from marketplace transactions.
Given that Valve's costs in developing Proton are offset by the higher Steam game purchase rates of Steam Deck users (myself included), the main benefit to developers is Steam's user base. As with Apple and the iOS app store, however, having what amounts to a monopoly in a market segment is not a justification for high platform access fees.
I mean… there’s Steam Workshop, Steam Voice, all the post, interactions, communities, etc.. all of this have to weight a lot on their budget.
My guess is that R&D as well as third-party Steam keys eat into their margins.
It could be more sustainable with this higher fee as well. Valve supports old games for a long time whereas console manufacturers pull the plug 10 years later. You could argue that Microsoft takes only 12%, but Microsoft has the luxury of being able to exit the PC games market at any time, or they can take a loss on it indefinitely. Valve needs to survive off its PC store because it's the only thing they really have
So there is a thing I kind of pirate, but not entirely – e-books.
But thing is, our public library page has e-books and some of them are available to be read online. Now I cannot officially download them, however opening a network tab on browser console shows me a request to download the whole .epub file. So what I do is copy that request as curl and just download it via terminal.
Is it piracy, probably, is this resource publicly available for me to read, definetly yes.
Other than that I don't really pirate much else.
I can't recall the last time I pirated anything executable (games and other software). There are legitimate free options for everything I've wanted, and executable code is just too risky.
well gog games can be safely pirated because the executables you're getting are signed with their digital signature.
it's much less morally correct tho, especially because most of the games published on gog are indie games, but if you have literally no money to spend (like I used to) there aren't any better options
Usually music made by artists from my country, if they have a website where I can pay for their music directly to them I do it that way.
Sometimes I rip CDs to replace music I've already pirated just for the feeling of having music I ripped myself.
Makes no sense, I know, but music is just for the feeling after all.
I mean, I can put up with far worse quality.
In some cases I have to. For example I have some classical songs ripped from YouTube that sound absolutely horrible, but I am kinda accustomed to those specific performances, and it's not always possible to find a better recording from one specific performance. And the other ones just sound... off. Sometimes this is also the case with remasters.
The worst one I have is a song from Beatles I am keeping both because it's one of the first files I downloaded when I was 8 and however weird it sounds, I got used to the compression artifacts. It's 32kbps HE-AAC at 22.05kHz sample rate. I don't even know its name. The name and metadata is in Chinese.
DRM-free ebooks. I make a point of buying them, of thanking the publisher... And not sharing it on the usual piracy channels.
Anything that is an executable on PC (software / games) due to security risk. Game ROMs for emulators are fine.
Food for thought. If you have decided you were never going to buy the game, what's the harm in pirating it
Honesty as an aspiring indie dev myself, I wouldn't mind you pirate my game BUT I just buy cheap indie games on sale without not being sure if I'm going to play them any time soon. Best case scenario I found new favorite game, worst case scenario, I just payed 8€ (-the expenses from the store) to some developer chasing their dream.
My wallet can take it and I like to support indie scene.
To check it out and realize I don't like it after like 15 minutes and then not have to deal with a refund.
Gimme a demo at least.
That indicates that you might buy it if it's good. The person I replied to implied they would never have purchased it at all.
Because if you're selfish enough you can enjoy the game at no cost to you guilt free.
I'm just pointing out the facts here.
I extremely rarely pirate games and software. It's just far too easy an attack vector for malware. The games I want to play are usually worth buying regardless, and free software is good enough for my needs. It isn't a flat out refusal, I've definitely pirated these things, but it's in niche situations where I need to see something specific, and I always check run it under a vm
Antivirus softwere. i cant even began to describe how horribly wrong can that go
I mean who the fuck pirate that, you went out of your way to pirate a software from a shady website just to protect yourself from other files u download from other shady websites
Newer malware wouldn't be easily detected. Linux app stores should be proactive when reviewing apps.
Back in the day, when I didn't know better I did try this. With Norton I believe. I'm not gonna drag this story, it ruined my boot, but for some reason it didn't steal or encrypt anything (Makes me think if I just fucked up the install instead of it being malicious). After re-installing Windows everything went back to normal, and I managed to get BitDefender & Malwarebytes another way xd. Good ol' times. 2/3 AV worked
ESET Endpoint, ESET used to be easy to pirate, box+Mara fix, then they patched that loophole and I was forced to subscribe to it (until I switched to Linux anyway) but I thought about putting eset on my windows VM and checked out the latest options for pirating it and I found out about ESET Endpoint which is self hosted antivirus for corporate environments. So we have pirates running their own Endpoint servers...virus definitions hosted by other pirates. That scared me a bit.
Not refusing, but lately I basically don't pirate games anymore. Steam made it so easy to buy games... + pirating games is always a pita with the required hacks etc. (or at least it was way back when I did it).
Software I don't pirate, I just use foss stuff wherever I can.
I also don't pirate books in general. Just get them on Kindle and support the author (and unfortunately also Jeff bezos)
I pay for Netflix (mainly for kids) and go to the theater for big movies, but aside from that I pirate all screen content.
I also pirate comics, but that's 90% because it's almost impossible to get them legally where I live. I would pay for DC unlimited if it was available in my neck of the woods.
I'm pretty much the same. Although my e-reader supports generic epub files, so I go to whichever book shop site and look for ebooks.
When I bought my e-reader, I specifically looked for one that wouldn't lock me into their ecosystem too much.
I've been using Kobo Libra 2 for more than a year now. It's good for me as I mostly read books. It's black and white and has adjustable (intensity and temperature) backlight. One thing I'd recomend – get a case as well. The screen is rather soft and scraches easily.
Other than that I can't recomend much else since I haven't had anything else. It'll depend very much on your use case: do you need a collored screen, what do you intend to read, comics, PDFs, regular books.
Reading regular books screen size does not matter as much as for PDFs and comics. And for comics colored screen might be a better choise.
My general recomendation: an adjustable backlight is a must, both intensity and temperature, deside on a size and color requirements and start looking for something in your price range. Kobo and Onyx were the brands I looked at first, but there are others.
Thank you for your suggestion. I found an old Android tablet. I used ForceDoze app using Shizuku (temp root) to prolong battery life for 3 days for using 3 hour daily. And using Moonreader + for my books with reading mode and put on a hazy screen protector. It works wonderfully now. Setup was a bit of hassle. But now it's done.
Kobo is where its at, Amazon has locked down their ecosystem to prevent piracy. Which also made my paperwhite garbage. Unless you're using Kindle Unlimited its not really worth going for kindle
I don’t understand this “Amazon has locked down” part. I easily send epub to my kindle through send to kindle or email, and the best part imo is whispersync that permits me to read among my iPhone and inkpalm 5.
Oh well if everything you do on your kindle is above board then I imagine it's a great device. Having had my jailbroken kindle auto updated to the latest version without me noticing and with no way to revert it, it has left me rather salty about the device. It can still read epubs but it now only receives KFX files from Amazon which can't be de-drm'd anymore.
On mobile read forum there are instructions to dedrm kfx from kindle. With some setbacks, I should point out
Nothing nowadays.
I’ll pirate indie games, see if it like it and if I do - I buy them to support the developer.
Similar with ebooks, I pirate them, read and if I like it. I will buy the physical book to support the author.
I used to pirated everything and left no survivors, now I bought Terraria one of my favorite game of all time with actually nice community and developers and it's felt wrong to pirate it, for softwares I just use open source alternatives or abuse free trial