When you are unable to obtain a "free" copy of something, do y'all just give in and pay for the thing? Or just give up on having the thing altogether?
I'm rich, so I buy it, rip it and upload it to pirate bay.
Thank you for your service.
King shit
o7
The millionaire of Lemmy
Give up, it's all just entertainment for me, so i can just go and be entertained by something else.
this is da wae
You either die a leecher or live long enough to become the seeder
It's never really about the price, it's about the convenience.
Yeah, sometimes I go so far to buy a game on Steam that got given away for free by Epic. EGS has the tendency to log me out all the time (maybe too many login across a bunch of devices) which annoys the heck out of me.
I agree, I choose the option that gives me the best experience. That is normally an unofficial option. For instance, I want to choose the tv shows accessible for my daughter. I want her to have access to tv shows from all over the world. There is no official service that offers that.
Give up. I refuse to pay for artificially scarce goods.
This same applies to public transport tickets, end up either staying home or walking for hours so I don't have to pay for the damn tickets that should be free.
public transport tickets
should be free
Coming soon, NYC ETA. 2026
Why should public transport be free? There are energy and building costs
Why should driving on roads be free? It costs the government money to build and maintain them, and it ain't cheap to bail out the auto industry whenever needed. And cleaning up the atmosphere isn't gonna be cheap. Why are the costs of driving mitigated at every level of society instead of just fully funding public transit?
I mean most "free" stuff isn't literally free, it would be more correct to say its socialized, tax-payer funded.
Ask that the state that should back it and make it cheap.
Why should only the wealthy be able to move around??
Just wait until you find out how much roads cost. No, gas and registration taxes don't even come close to covering it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0
Cannot speak for anyone else, but it depends on his badly I want it and whether or not I am willing to give money to said compant/person/whatever.
Is it an old out of print game that suddenly had prices jacked up 500% by scalpers/scammers? It ain't worth me trying to find a ROM if the sources I like don't have it, nor buying it.
Is it from some indie dev/devs that probably don't have the financial stability to afford everyone pirating their game? I'm more likely to buy if I can afford.
Did a large company like Sintendo, Activision, etcetera, make it? For older titles, I am likely to buy if it's a low enough price and I have a real interest in it. Newer titles? I usually don't bother because the quality for most triple AAA studios isn't up to par for me since I don't like buying reskins of the same game with somehow less of the basic features available unless you pay.
Side note: looking forward to Black Ops 99 where you have to pay $9.99 per pixel to be able to see the screen as you play and still have people buy the game, willing to pay for every pixel... only to find out the game servers are constantly offline for an online only experience they don't get to play and by purchasing the game you somehow agreed to give Activision access to your bank account to do as they please with that money.
Edit:
For shows and movies, if I can't easily find it, I don't bother because it's a much bigger hassle than video game piracy. Same with books.
Depends on what it is... if it's a movie that I can't find, I'll usually just wait until an ethical version shows up somewhere later.
If it's a research paper or a book I'm looking for, though, I take paywalling as a personal insult - I usually go to extreme lengths to obtain it, and I usually do get it.
I usually give up or find a free alternative. Typically, if something is available at a good price I won't bother trying to get it free to begin with.
It's usually the opposite that's the issue for me. If it's not free, OK, let's pay, but if it's not a reasonable price for the product (including both the content, usability, and reusability, in case of media), then I'll go out of my way to get it free or totally give up on it depending on how much I want it. That's why I switched from piracy to Netflix for many years and now am back to piracy because I like shows in the background while working on projects, for example, or piracy, then Steam, then, fuck gaming as much because I found other hobbies.
It is very infrequent that I find myself needing a form of entertainment. Generally, when I am unable to find it on the high seas, it is entirely unobtainable through legal channels.
It is far more frequent that I find myself purchasing a thing I have previously pirated.
Piracy is typically my last resort. It means it's already unavailable under acceptable conditions.
Keep searching , never ever give up .
The latter, because I don't have money
Most of the stuff I want to pirate, is because they are expensively rare or not available through stores. Mind, that might change in the future, just because of how crap the US economy is becoming for the ordinary person.
I want to support cool stuff by paying, if the terms are reasonable. That means no DRM, all content, and an appropriate price. It is mostly hentai games that I am buying, since the developers of those definitely need the money.
Indeed, wanker's cramp is expensive to treat
Depends. A while back, I was looking for an old, relatively obscure but unimportant album, and could only find one copy on eBay. It was only a couple bucks, so I bought it, ripped it, and uploaded it. Now it's preserved and available.
I also had an experimental EP album I downloaded from YouTube that I really enjoyed. At some point the author took it down, so I uploaded it to archive.org, again for preservation and availability. Later the author found it and commented something like "hey this is my work, what's it doing here", so I took it down. But I still have it and I'll put it back up when they stop making music.
If it was something easily available for a few bucks, I wouldn't publish it. Creators deserve compensation for their labor too. They need to eat. For something that they're charging way too much for, and they're not hurting for cash, especially if it's not easily available, yeah I wouldn't have a second thought about pirating and republishing it.
In your case, with the 99% availability, I'd try to complete the torrent and seed in any way possible. If that's not possible, I'd purchase and republish, filling in the missing files if possible or creating a new torrent if not.
"hey this is my work, what's it doing here"
Uh so other people can discover your work which therefor, should be an inspiration for you as an artist, to keep going? Duh. Would you have rather it be lost to the sands of time and nobody to know you and what you done so you can be a nobody?
I mean in the past when torrenting was new and very white hot, some artists actually torrented their works and got discovered that way. It was a badge of honor.
Usually the second, which is the most common option, because we know objectively that studios are in fact not "losing" eleventy billion dollars to piracy. If that were true most people would choose the first.
I'm not buying the new Pokémon game. I'll play it on an emulator if it's not too much hassle. I don't have plans to ever buy it, and if it never works on emulation, I will just not play it.
In a different case, I've gone from pirating a bunch of games to buying them because I liked them and wanted the updates. BG3 for example.
If something is worth paying for I just do that up-front. (Outside of some exceptions where I actively don’t want to support the creator or license holder)
I end up sometimes giving up on having the thing. Because sometimes it's an effect of just feeling personal greed.
But I will almost never give in and pay for the thing. Some things out there, aren't worth the price and even if the price was right, it's not worth the support.
Like Microsoft, I've not paid for a single Windows OS in my entire life. I've always gotten Windows second hand or buying machines off from people who happen to have the latest Windows on it.
Adobe, haven't paid a single penny for their Photoshop program, kept pirating.
Part of pirating is just wheeling and patience. You will eventually, one day, get what you seek.
Windows can be activated via the command line
During college, I got all my books online Zlib or LibGen and the small amount of times i couldn't find any I'd pay someone who had a PDF copy as my last ditch effort.
Depends on how much I want it.
For music, I buy the CDs (if I can) to support the artist.
But I also recently ripped my whole spotify playlist.
For other types of media, if it's not in the quality I want, and it's reasonable in price, I'll pay it.
Then I'll rip it and put it in my library.
The album that costs $10-$20 puts less than half a dollar to the actual maker. Single digit pennies more often than not.
Concerts get them the most income and Ticketmaster is monopoly. Government, Govern Mente, to Control the Mind
If think with Mani Mani, you will be speaking with opposite meaning, not knowing why, and be psychotic because you will be physically attacked by objects and stop trying to understand anything anymore.
Cult.
This is exceedingly rare, but I would buy it and then share it with the world for free.
I give up on having that thing. I'm unemployed, I don't have any income at all. When I have a well paying job though I'd rather just pay, there are a lot of people I would like to support.
There's a child of books that I've bought in this way.
Also I bought some books that I've pirated, to support the author.
Piracy is my main resort been doing it so long. After HD-DVD lost I was done buying media. Don't get me wrong I still pirated before that but it was more renting and ripping DVDs.
I'm not employed and have little to no money, so...
Give up. I never buy something I can't try out. There have been several games that caught my eye but were not available, and so I simply moved on
Depends on how expensive it is, what kind of license the paid version has, how willing I am to support the creator. Music I’ll try and get from bandcamp or failing that an actual cd from their site of I really must. TV I’ll usually just look harder and settle for a worse quality than I’d prefer.
Depends. Sometimes I'll give it up all together. If I think it's worth it I'll buy it. Other times I thought it wouldn't be worth it and I pirate it and then I end up buying it afterwards. Other times I just wait for a steep discount/sale.
I never pay Capitalist corps/people unless pressured to a corner (most groceries, loans etc). I know they cheat, steal and lie - pretty much 24/7 - as their 'free market' gospel dictates, so any support for such a selfish/psychopathic organization are like shooting my self in the foot.
Intellectual 'property' is a special anti-intellectual joke that have emerged inside an existing Capitalist dystopia where everyone have to fight everyone else for their lives. So suddenly, some Capitalist smuck could whistle a tune, declare that sequence of sounds as "MY PROPERTY" and then - through violence! - everyone around the world have to pay this moron for the sequence of sounds. It doesn't get much more dumb than that. We even see cities 'protect' their landmarks, so a f'ing photo is illegal without paying up, copyright for well known everyday things, and so on. It is incredibly easy to find insane examples. It's all a race to the bottom, sigh.. Oc, Capitalism have zero to do with 'free markets', and everything to do with warring/exploitation/protectionism - but all corps will always exploit.
Unfortunately, Capitalism runs on pure scarcity, so we can't have surplus objects that can just be copied, tsk tsk, what disorder !! And of cause, if one lives in such a crappy backwards society, then everyone HAVE to fight for data that can be copyrighted, data that could otherwise be copied a gazillion times for everyones joy. So, Instead of free access to all that can be freely copied/enjoyed, we have capitalist silo's of 'property', where everyone are forced to pay up to a conglomerate of capitalist cancer-like entities that will go to any length - even jailing people that refuse that violent/ridiculous property nonsense. No no, for propertarians, it's better to slam everyone in the world with laws/threats of harm, to invade peoples privacy, and to have a whole multi-trillion business market, and an insane amount of law resources constantly working to keep this joke of a principle running. It all arose from out of that flawed premise of everyone fighting everyone else.. Inefficient, stupid, and all just an unnecessary emergent artifact on top of the dumbest ideology the oligarchs ever invented.
I completely agree with what you're saying.
It's the morons among us that can't accept they've been taken for a ride.
When I was in college, often yes, as the "free" thing was typically a textbook I needed to actually pass a class.
Nowadays? Meh, I probably don't need that random movie that bad. I have so little time for entertainment that if I can't get it from a torrent site in a few minutes I just find something else.
so, usually if i can't find it through direct download or torrent, i might try asking around, or looking in open directories even, and if all of that fails i lay awake at night Really bothered
Depends on the thing, how much money I have, and whether I think it's worth it for the price they're charging.
Like when I don't have time to make bread I just steal it from loblaws.
I am far too poor to afford to buy shit. If I can’t pirate shit, I just do without. The only thing I pay for is music because they did it right. Mostly the same music on every platform. None of this exclusive bullshit. Plus it’s easier than piracy. Plus I listen to so much music
did it one textbooks one time, when i couldnt find it to pirate like 10 years ago. they were going hard against any newer versions before, and against the torrents/downloaders who were hosting the pirates.
Really depends on what it is but I usually wait until there’s an good sale of said product.
For example;
If it's a physical object, I do what i need to do. But I've developed the policy that I don't pay real money for unreal things. And anything I cannot experience with all five senses is unreal.
I'm intrigued. Do you mean that you may experience it with five senses or that you must experience it with five senses?
Do you pay for clothes and eat them when they wear out? Do you taste and listen to household cleaners? Are silent things invisible to you, or do you use a form of echolocation?
And anything I cannot experience with all five senses is unreal.
Um... Wikipedia isn't real? So what have people been donating to? Thin air?
😱
/j
To me, yes. I would be willing to buy a copy of Britannica or another printed encyclopedia.
Take it as a challenge and waste inordinate amounts of time finding it 'free'!
Torrent stuck at 99.9% :/
The only seed has 99.9% availability, I am doubting anyone actually has 100%.
I have a funny storry:
there is a book I really wanted to read. It is an old af psychology science book. There is no pirated version of it anywhere.
I found one copy of it on the used market and bought it because the price was ok (70$).
At home, I open it up and go through it properly and see that THE MOST IMPORTANT CHAPTER WAS CUT OUT!!! Literally there were the ends of the pages still bound with strings and you can see a wavy scalpel cut where the rest of the page would be.
Thats the physical equivalent of an incomplete torrent. Felt so bad.
have you tried staring at the torrent? if it doesnt work try staring longer
That's a special kind of pain.
"What do you mean 'force start' isn't doing anything?!?!"
It honestly depends. If it's something I was on the fence about AND it's not absurdly overpriced, probably just buy. Or put on a Steam wishlist for some future sale while I keep trying to find elsewhere.
Ive had decent luck watching things stuck at 99.9% and having it work fine. Sometimes it's just an .nfo file or the like thats missing.
Which torrent is it
Are you on audibookbay?
There's also a chance that the seeder finished the download but their software didn't actually finished processing the files. Sometimes just copying the content to another location (to be safe) and renaming the "part" files to its intended file extension is all you need to do.
Same. For me it's not about the money but the service and experience. I wouldn't mind buying a blu-ray and ripping it but I'm not going to subscribe to some service, log in, and use their app to watch a single show or movie because I find that whole process to be a chore.
A chore, frequently an obnoxious experience and lastly a trap.
I don't want a promise of 'maybe we will let you view this until we capriciously remove it from our service'. Either I own what I pay for or no deal. I try to heavily prioritize GOG over Steam and while I have some streaming services in my orbit (not my choices) I always have 'backup' copies of my own.
I have spent 3 hours once to find this with a reasonable resolution, bitrate and subtitles (the subs were the hard part):
Same issue with "FUTURE WAR 198X年".
In the end I got a copy from archive.org with hardsubbed english subs
That's how we do it! Take no prisoners and don't accept substandard booty.
Yarrrr!
And then seed it to torrent