Piracy gave me a future.
August 16, 2015 8:06 PM   Subscribe

 
Haaaaa. Just read it... story of my life. I didn't steal from my friends, but I did once not give a friend a birthday card my parents had given me for him, because I was embarrassed about how much money they had put in it, and that it was money and not a cool Lego set or whatever the other kids would give. So the friend actually then saw the card and assumed I kept it so I could steal the money... and it was like the worst, most crestfallen I had ever felt.

But anyway, yes, the same friend had shelves and shelves of whatever comic book he was into, and most of the new games, and whatever books from the school book order, etc. I didn't begrudge him any of it, I just wanted so desperately to have hobbies and interests like he did. I felt like I couldn't afford to have interests. I couldn't afford any book that wasn't in the public library... once interlibrary loan was introduced to me by my school librarian I was in a wonderland. But I couldn't see rare movies I wanted to see (or anything foreign/anime, lol) or afford any music at all. Piracy was a godsend... I mean, you could even pirate ebooks! ANY BOOK YOU WANTED! Amazing.
posted by easter queen at 8:15 PM on August 16, 2015 [30 favorites]


Being poor sucks. Pirating games opens your computer up to many potential security risks and it's often a royal pain in the ass to get the game working in the end anyhow. I know that many people who pirate games would love to be able to pay the developer and get a stable, safe version of the game but they just can't afford it. If everyone is pirating a game, maybe that's the market's way of saying the price point is too high.
posted by dazed_one at 8:24 PM on August 16, 2015 [6 favorites]


The software I pirated got me started in my career and the companies I stole from made way more money once I got going than they would have if I'd stayed poor. My small thefts cost them nothing because every economic choice I made was between food and something else -- there's no way I would have been able to buy Flash (it was the 00s!) or Photoshop. Ten years later, I'd probably still be in the bottles 'n' cans business.
posted by klanawa at 8:42 PM on August 16, 2015 [18 favorites]


Now that I'm not (quite as) poor, I do pay for nearly all my media, unless I just plain can't get access any other way, and even there, well, I've usually got plenty else I want to read/watch/listen to. But during a lot of my life, I wouldn't have had access to a lot of technology and media any other way. It's not just the arts. As far as I'm concerned, the middle classes should pay for everything they use, because creators absolutely do work with value, and I think the price points now on games/movies/music are way more sensible than they used to be. But anybody who isn't yet middle class? Take anything that isn't nailed down. Especially take the things that somebody with power over you doesn't want you to have.
posted by Sequence at 8:51 PM on August 16, 2015 [25 favorites]


YMMV

In my case poverty (plus a disinterest in piracy) led to less time playing games, less time making art, more time figuring out how the fuck one uses something like Linux to do anything productive. Very frustrating, in the short run. In the long run this led to a decent career as a programmer who does a bit of devops.
posted by idiopath at 8:56 PM on August 16, 2015 [13 favorites]


But I couldn't see rare movies I wanted to see (or anything foreign/anime, lol) or afford any music at all.

This reminded me of when a friend came over to my house and I had one CD. He couldn't understand how I could just listen to the one CD over and over. He had books full of them (those CD sleeve books people used to have). But I was a kid, without a job, and my parents couldn't afford to just buy me CDs because I wanted music. Then came Napster.
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 8:57 PM on August 16, 2015 [7 favorites]


When I was 15 and dirt poor? You bet your ass I pirated my ass off.

Now that I'm 32 and our household has a respectable income? I Steam Sale my ass off.
posted by Talez at 9:19 PM on August 16, 2015 [28 favorites]


Minecraft in 2012.

Minecraft in 2015.
posted by adept256 at 9:34 PM on August 16, 2015 [25 favorites]


Sometimes I still pirate for the simplicity of it.

Buy a piece of software and now I have to create a user account with some website, perhaps install a license server and place the license. Is it working? Did it find the license? What's the serial? Why can't I copy and paste it in? Ok fine, I'll just type it in. Now I'm running the thing and it needs to update. Fine whatever. Using it and it's constantly phoning home. It updates every damn day. Leave me alone and let me work...

Whereas I pirate the thing and it's like a rar file and a patch or keygen and I'm coasting.

Especially for evaluating software before buying I will often just get a pirated copy to check it out and worry about a full and proper install of legit software if it's going to fit the bill...

Also why can't the world leave me alone with subscription models for like EVERYTHING these days.
posted by jnnla at 9:36 PM on August 16, 2015 [14 favorites]


Exactly jnnla. Many times I've become so frustrated with onerous DRM I've resorted to cracking it, despite having paid full price already.

Nowadays you don't buy a game, you buy a license to play it.

Always online for single-player games is simply asinine, too.
posted by adept256 at 9:41 PM on August 16, 2015 [3 favorites]


I am not rich, but I am also not poor. I recently moved to a poor area, and I have had an uptick in the amount of property crime I've been a victim of.

This helped me understand where these thieves are coming from. I knew they justified it to themselves, but this article put a sort of face to it.

Money sucks.
posted by keep_evolving at 9:41 PM on August 16, 2015 [6 favorites]


If I'm making money off it's use, I pay. Ditto for most entertainment.
posted by five fresh fish at 10:06 PM on August 16, 2015 [1 favorite]


The former for obvious reasons. The latter so that more io what I like gets made.
posted by five fresh fish at 10:09 PM on August 16, 2015


Meanwhile, the ESA flips its shit at the EFF's attempt to make it legal to modify unsupported online games, making it clear that they consider all piracy to be equal.
posted by BiggerJ at 10:09 PM on August 16, 2015 [4 favorites]


The behavior of sort of mainline consumer fandom/geekdom looks very strange when you are poor.

So faddish, concerned with things that are not quality, or at best poor trackers of quality. The cycle of anticipation, squee, total immersion, disillusionment, repeat... That looks like the real product, the series of emotional states being ridden and enjoyed by the people shelling out the money. The actual product itself could be nothing at all.
posted by nom de poop at 10:10 PM on August 16, 2015 [31 favorites]


Back when virtualization was a new idea and I did a fair amount of windows administration (don't miss that), I pirated a fancy Enterprise version of VMWare at home to learn how to use it and to see if it did what I hoped it would. I did and it did. Being well satisfied with its utility, I proposed and implemented a project to condense many physical servers into virtual servers on fewer boxes with much easier maintenance. My employer saved a lot of money using fewer boxes, I learned a salable skill and got a promotion, and VMWare sold their software at full price.

Win-win-win. All the result of my petty crime. Because I sure as hell wasn't going to pay a couple grand for that software out of pocket and I wasn't going to risk asking my boss to pay for a pig in a poke.
posted by double block and bleed at 11:01 PM on August 16, 2015 [13 favorites]


If the RIAA et al. want people to buy media, push for policies that support the existence of a middle class. There are only so many copies of Michael Bolton's GH that the 1% will buy.
posted by persona au gratin at 11:07 PM on August 16, 2015 [14 favorites]


This is why I will be seeding Sesame Street.
posted by chortly at 11:16 PM on August 16, 2015 [25 favorites]


persona au gratin, that is a thought that I've had many times. Take three quarters of the budget spent on copyright violation and spend it on lobbying income inequality instead... and I reckon that'd be much more effective at stopping theft and increasing their market. It's what I think of every time I hear the rich using moral arguments to protect media cashflow.
posted by tychotesla at 11:19 PM on August 16, 2015 [6 favorites]


I was just reminded now of another strong incentive for piracy. Windows 7's "Recovery Console" comes only on an install disk that many computers don't come with anymore. In the past I have actually downloaded an entire pirated Windows 7 ISO specifically to get access to THAT DAMN RECOVERY CONSOLE SO THAT I COULD THEN USE IT IN ORDER TO FIX MY LEGAL COPY OF WINDOWS 7 THAT MICROSOFT DIDN'T SEEM TO THINK I WOULD EVER NEED TO REPAIR ARRGGGHHHHJKLGJSLJHLKSJLSGH
posted by JHarris at 11:35 PM on August 16, 2015 [21 favorites]


Actually, until last year, you could get full legal ISOs of any version of any a country of Win 7 from Digital River. MS took them all down last year for some reason (probably Win 10).
posted by FJT at 11:44 PM on August 16, 2015 [1 favorite]


I relate to some of this, not that my family was so poor (very middle class). I simply had very strict guardians who felt it was character-building for a kid to be deprived. I had two purchased albums as a teen until I was able to got a job sometime around 16 or 17. I must've listened to those two albums hundreds or thousands of times. All the other music I had before then were copies from friends, but they felt like a lifeline. Books were also a connection (and the web didn't exist yet).

It's interesting to see all this from the viewpoint of someone who grew up poor. Many kids feel similarly trapped by their circumstances for other reasons, too.

I look at many parents I know now who try to give their kids opportunities and help them grow into the person they were meant to be as individuals and contrast it with my own experience growing up.

I feel jealous of those kids sometimes since I was often pushed in directions that were destructive for me. Sometimes finding ways to connect outside a very limited world can be freeing and open possibilities, even if it's not the accepted way to do things.
posted by clickingmongrel at 11:51 PM on August 16, 2015 [5 favorites]


FJT, 1. they're gone NOW aren't they, 2. I don't recall finding these when I NEEDED them, and 3. it's not the first time I've had to resort to extra-legal means to make use of a software license I fucking own.
posted by JHarris at 12:03 AM on August 17, 2015 [1 favorite]


Entire countries, including the US, have grown up on pirated IP (books, patents, etc.).
posted by pracowity at 12:13 AM on August 17, 2015 [9 favorites]


Micky wept.
posted by Chitownfats at 2:29 AM on August 17, 2015 [1 favorite]


and I don't support pirating games if you can afford to buy them

This is where I've been standing for a while. If a kid without means is pirating stuff, the industry should put that down as investment ("first hit is free" etc), because when they have the money, it's likely they'll channel that money into their existing hobbies.

I think I've mentioned here before that as a kid growing up, I had little access to music - my older brother was and still is a bookworm, and I disliked the metal/grunge scene that was all the rage on my early teens. It took the early days of good old AudioGalaxy along allmusic (and later soulseek and wikipedia) to find out stuff I liked and knowing people that would push me in that direction. If I only heard a bunch of names and no chance of actually listening to them, not a chance that during the time I was employed, I would have spent thousands on records or gigs/festivals, to the point for a stretch of about two years, most of my disposable income was geared towards either. At the same time my game collection grew up a few dozens to a few hundreds, this excluding steam and gog.
posted by lmfsilva at 2:56 AM on August 17, 2015 [7 favorites]


It made me smile and donate when one of the tiers for the Kickstarter for the Timbleweed game was:
"I pirated Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island when I was a kid and I feel bad!" This reward tier instantly absolves you of all guilt and includes the Thimbleweed Park game. All subsequent tiers also include guilt absolution.
posted by Static Vagabond at 5:03 AM on August 17, 2015 [27 favorites]


The whole framing of "is piracy good or is piracy bad?" misses the point. I'm old enough to remember the propaganda campaign of the entertainment industry to convince the public that "piracy" was a bad thing and that we should all call it "piracy." We should just have a public server that has all digitizable culture archived on it, free for anyone to download. This is easily possible with today's technology. An arts program should be established so that artists are subsidized by the state. Then we can eliminate this socially unnecessary dead weight of entertainment executives, lawyers and marketers from our economy, and everyone can share culture freely.

Hopefully this "piracy"-as-anti-poverty meme catches on so freedom of information and free access to culture becomes a political issue. Because a bunch of nerds running around screaming "Information wants to be free!" certainly hasn't done the trick.
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 5:11 AM on August 17, 2015 [8 favorites]


I do know of one industry that was shut down (well, never really got going) due to piracy. When the UK Gov got wind of this microcomputer thingy back in the early 80s, a number of things happened, including the creation of the BBC Micro. One of its jobs was to be an educational computer, not just to teach about computing but to start getting it used across the syllabus. Which meant educational software feeding a large, captive, enthusiastic need.

Great stuff - encourage business to meet that need, and you spread the sort of skills-based IT entrepreneurship that would give coal miners something to do, turn us into a leader in 21st century technologies, and so on.

But it turned out that schools didn't have bottomless software budgets - all this IT was an additional cost, and even the hardware was often a stretch - and teachers felt absolutely no moral compunction against sharing useful software among themselves (like photocopying articles, right?). There were other factors (such as this stuff not being very good), but it quickly became obvious that you couldn't make a penny at this, even with a free run at an information-based vertical that was extremely interested in the potential. You sold a handful of copies and then... nothing.

In retrospect, there are natural sharing economies and you have to respect their rules to work in them, and we're still in the early stages of understanding this - in particular, how it interacts with the grumpy overlords of classical capitalism.
posted by Devonian at 5:13 AM on August 17, 2015 [5 favorites]


You wouldn't download bread, would you?
posted by blue_beetle at 5:17 AM on August 17, 2015 [8 favorites]


We should just have a public server that has all digitizable culture archived on it, free for anyone to download. This is easily possible with today's technology. [..] Because a bunch of nerds running around screaming "Information wants to be free!" certainly hasn't done the trick.

So, um, the nerds did build that server but because of the current laws, they only give out accounts to other nerds.
posted by ryanrs at 5:31 AM on August 17, 2015 [7 favorites]


If the RIAA et al. want people to buy media, push for policies that support the existence of a middle class. There are only so many copies of Michael Bolton's GH that the 1% will buy.

The 1% buy the actual Michael Bolton live in concert for their kid's birthday party. Poor rich kid.
posted by srboisvert at 5:37 AM on August 17, 2015 [3 favorites]


Michael Bolton is a cineaste.
posted by maxsparber at 5:40 AM on August 17, 2015



The 1% buy the actual Michael Bolton live in concert for their kid's birthday party. Poor rich kid.


Technically that's the .01%. The 1% just download Michael Bolton onto their kid's new iPhone. But look: the bigger issue they're all terrible parents because no real kid wants Michael Bolton anywhere near a birthday party, unless he's maybe with the Lonely Island or some shit like that.
posted by thivaia at 5:42 AM on August 17, 2015 [2 favorites]


MICROSOFT DIDN'T SEEM TO THINK I WOULD EVER NEED TO REPAIR ARRGGGHHHHJKLGJSLJHLKSJLSGH

Been a Linux guy since 2005 but have always had a pirated copy of Win 7 around. I bought a laptop 6 months ago that has a legal copy of Win 7. Recently grabbed a copy of Win 10 Pro and an activation crack and ran it in Virtualbox to check it out. And decided to upgrade the laptop (free) as well as throw a legal copy on my desktop ($200 for product id). I shelled the 200 smacks. The laptop upgrade recognized the legal Win 7 installation and took an hour then failed with an inscrutable error about SAFE_OS phase. Tried with a DVD, same result. Tried with Media Creation Tool and made a USB stick, same deal. Then I tried to upgrade the non-legal installation on my desktop. Win 10 recognized the installation was not genuine and asked for my product id, which I happily typed in. An hour later the upgrade (100% paid for and legal) failed with the same error as the laptop. Frustrated, I allowed it to blow away the existing partition and installed it clean. Finally, a working, legal Win 10 Pro! It immediately began downloading a "Cumulative Update for Windows 10" and when finished went into a restart loop. 3 restarts to get to a failure to install message, 3 more restarts to "restoring your computer to its previous state". And then it started downloading the same cumulative update again. After HOURS of watching this, I manually grabbed the cumulative from the MS website and tried that. 6 restarts later, I was finished. Not the update, mind you, *I* was finished. Now MS says, and "common knowledge" is, that you cannot turn off Windows Updates in Win 10. That's utter BS. As the sun rose on the morning horizon, I went into Computer Management, Services, Windows Update, and disabled that service. So, now for my $200 I have a working and legal Win10 Pro on my desktop that will never receive updates. And my laptop, which I must upgrade (as opposed to clean install) is still sitting on Win 7. Have a nice day. Bill is.
posted by quonsar II: smock fishpants and the temple of foon at 5:46 AM on August 17, 2015 [5 favorites]


I think one of the things that made Napster so amazing was not simply that you could download things for free, but that you could download so many things that were not even available for purchase.

I downloaded some pop hits, I guess, but the majority of the things I found on Napster were albums that were no longer available commercially, songs that had NEVER been available commercially, weird things like the Thundercats outtakes track or all the Sifl and Olly mp3s that were floating around, songs from the Buffy score that you couldn’t buy anywhere. If I had been able to buy any of those things, maybe I would have. But since they existed via piracy and in no other way, piracy it was.

I think it actually opened the eyes of a lot of content owners— wait, people want this stuff? People want access to these things we own and have locked in a vault?

(Some of this stuff is STILL impossible to buy. I once ran a one-woman letter writing campaign begging MTV to release their “25 Lame Videos” special (starring Jon Stewart, Janeane Garofalo, Dennis Leary, and for some reason, Chris Kattan, in a junky set making fun of music videos) in some format that I could buy. No luck yet. Still stuck with my ancient VHS copy, aka, 95% of the reason I still own a VCR.)

It seems like entertainment companies are just really reluctant to view piracy as an investment, not to mention a free form of market research. THIS many people have pirated this thing we don’t care about and have considered to be worthless? Let’s re-release it for a special price and that’s free money.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 5:56 AM on August 17, 2015 [6 favorites]


You wouldn't download bread, would you?

Unless the French version of the RIAA is watching.
posted by dances with hamsters at 6:29 AM on August 17, 2015


not to mention a free form of market research
I think in the times when Suprnova was a thing, a couple anime had official releases in the west because the fansubbed tv/dvd rips were crazy popular in some trackers, and by their math, if the usual percentage of people that download end up buying, they'd make some money.

Also, studios do love some tracker statistics to say that 53827 seeds = 53827 lost sales. They do use it as market research, just not in a positive way.
posted by lmfsilva at 6:43 AM on August 17, 2015 [2 favorites]


An arts program should be established so that artists are subsidized by the state. Then we can eliminate this socially unnecessary dead weight of entertainment executives, lawyers and marketers from our economy, and everyone can share culture freely.

But at what level are they subsidized? Doesn't matter, it won't be enough for the percentage of Americans who view themselves not as poor but as temporarily disadvantaged millionaires. So nobody gets it. See also: guaranteed income plans.
posted by phearlez at 7:13 AM on August 17, 2015


I tried to resist the urge to make a comment about the state of ethics in game journalism.

I failed.
posted by ocschwar at 7:22 AM on August 17, 2015


dazed_one: If everyone is pirating a game, maybe that's the market's way of saying the price point is too high.

This is conflating two issues: 1) the price point for an individual game versus "the market's" (aka individual people's) willingness to pay that price, and 2) the interest in the product by people who have little to no money to spend on luxury/non-essential items.

Kickstarter and Bandcamp (and a Bandcamp-like service, whose name eludes me now), with sliding scales for purchasing goods makes sense, especially for digital goods. You can sell the basic item for a low price, and give people the option to pay more out of gratitude or appreciation for the item, or pay more for extra stuff (Bandcamp doesn't do the latter, but that other service does).


keep_evolving: I am not rich, but I am also not poor. I recently moved to a poor area, and I have had an uptick in the amount of property crime I've been a victim of.

This helped me understand where these thieves are coming from. I knew they justified it to themselves, but this article put a sort of face to it.


This comment made me think of a Vince Staples, who said that most of his audience at concerts were white folks, because that is, by and large, who can afford to attend his concerts. That was my "oh shit" moment akin to yours. There's plenty of interest in his music, but tickets (and travel to venues, and all that) costs decent money, especially for more popular artists.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:23 AM on August 17, 2015


You wouldn't download bread, would you?

Nope, got kicked of GlutinNova because I could keep my ratio high enough :-(
posted by davros42 at 7:28 AM on August 17, 2015 [3 favorites]


I pirated a ton of music and software as a kid, not because I was poor, but because those goods were crazy expensive for me (Photoshop, import or out of print CDs that still sell for $40 a pop), and there was no YouTube or Soundcloud to sample music before paying for it. Piracy creates an international library, increasing general awareness and skills with items that are otherwise inaccessible. Since then, I've spent a ton of money, buying some software but mostly buying music that I would never otherwise would have known about.

(Also, my logic is that if a CD is out of print, no money is going to the artist from the second hand market any way, just someone who was fortunate enough to pick it up when it was on sale, or buy it from someone else.)
posted by filthy light thief at 7:28 AM on August 17, 2015


jnnla: Also why can't the world leave me alone with subscription models for like EVERYTHING these days.

Because software companies realized "someone could buy our expensive product once and never buy an upgrade, even if we bundle in tons of new features, or we could charge a low monthly rent for a license and get a steady flow of income, enough to support continual upgrades and new features."

This is carrying over into the music world in a couple ways: eMusic is a long-time subscription service, where you pay a flat fee each month, initially for "credits" and now for money towards downloading music. I like them because their prices are lower than most other stores, and it's legit. Then there's Drip.fm, where you can subscribe to labels or artists and get everything new they create in a given month, and they can make old material available, too. Drip is good if you like a certain label, and because you can download the files (lossless, if you wish), along with streaming the music.
/fanboy
posted by filthy light thief at 7:35 AM on August 17, 2015 [2 favorites]


One of the dirty secrets about piracy is that developers sometimes want you to pirate their software, or at least benefit from it. While piracy won't pay the development costs, nothing will sink a piece of software faster than if nobody uses it all. Photoshop is an example of a program like this; nobody can afford the price except already employers and successful professionals. And they'd be the only ones who knew how to use it, except possibly actual art majors who get educational discounts (but it's still really expensive, even then), if nobody pirated it. And it would have been supplanted by a low cost/no cost replacement long ago, since everyone else would have used something cheaper, and that developer could have used that experience base to move into the professional sphere and take over.
posted by Mitrovarr at 7:36 AM on August 17, 2015 [12 favorites]


someone could buy our expensive product once and never buy an upgrade

Yeah, my dad is PISSED because the Windows 10 upgrade removed Photoshop from his computer, and he no longer has the installation disc (borrowed from a friend). Windows: Now Helping Other Companies Execute Planned Obsolescence Strategies.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 7:41 AM on August 17, 2015 [5 favorites]


So faddish, concerned with things that are not quality, or at best poor trackers of quality. The cycle of anticipation, squee, total immersion, disillusionment, repeat... That looks like the real product, the series of emotional states being ridden and enjoyed by the people shelling out the money. The actual product itself could be nothing at all.

Oh, absolutely. I was so confused by the things my richer friends with mainstream tastes were SO INTO, because once I gained access they looked like absolute garbage to me. When you only have so much money to spare for entertainment, quality/significance becomes a lot more important. It was blindingly obvious to me once I started earning money and participating myself how much the entertainment industry is just an opiate for the masses. Hello, dystopia.
posted by easter queen at 8:08 AM on August 17, 2015 [2 favorites]


Piracy was a godsend... I mean, you could even pirate ebooks! ANY BOOK YOU WANTED! Amazing.

This wasn't much of a thing when I was in college, but I recently noticed one of the types of media people pirate pretty frequently these days is actually the textbook! It makes sense -- required reading for college classes can mean purchasing the latest edition of a >$200 hardcover for each class or else hovering over the one copy on reserve in the library in the hopes that none of the other 100 students want to use it, and course materials are mostly not covered by any financial aid. (Not to mention that it makes those materials available to self-studiers who might not even have access to college courses at all.)
posted by en forme de poire at 8:15 AM on August 17, 2015 [2 favorites]


You wouldn't download bread, would you?

Not until the compression algorithms for it get to the point where there isn't so much quality loss and there aren't so many taste artifacts in the decompressed file.
posted by eustacescrubb at 8:21 AM on August 17, 2015 [2 favorites]


The simple truth is, you should steal what you cannot afford, and lie about what you've done in order to get ahead.

Nobody is going to help you, and your contribution to society is valuable, so please... steal and lie a bit. In the long run, everyone benefits.

And be grateful you have the privileges in life to not have to steal the basics, such as food and money, because that will get you arrested.

Perhaps once you've got that great job, you'll consider this and try to help others out, so that they don't have to steal or lie quite as much... or when they do, they won't have to rot in prison for it.
posted by markkraft at 8:27 AM on August 17, 2015 [14 favorites]


Photoshop is now in the cloud, making it harder to pirate, but they do have kinda-cheap subscriptions for their programs. I still think something like Gimp is going to be what your average kid-without-a-credit-card is using though. And they should, because Adobe needs some kind of competition.
posted by emjaybee at 9:17 AM on August 17, 2015 [3 favorites]


The simple truth is, you should steal what you cannot afford, and lie about what you've done yt in order to get ahead.

Nobody is going to help you, and your contribution to society is valuable, so please... steal and lie a bit. In the long run, everyone benefits.


*raises hand* Hadn't really put it together until now but pirating some information in the past three years has gotten me ahead, off minimum wage and in a place where I can now afford to get even further ahead. I used academic material and a couple of courses which I torrented to get the job position I'm in now. There's no way I would have been able to afford to buy the texts and videos. Now I'm in a position where I'm able to pay and I do.

During those lean years I did torrent a couple of games to have some fun and not give up my hobby altogether. Now I'm happy enough to pay, because I can. Could finally afford a couple of games I've been waiting months to play and it was awesome to just buy them and not have to muss around getting torrent copies to work.

I have also tried some software that I couldn't get with trial by torrenting. I've been burned too many times with either crap or that it doesn't work for what I want and need. I don't feel bad doing this at all. I do end up buying what I use because I appreciate the work that goes into good piece of software and just delete whatever I don't use.

It is weird now that I think of it. I could still get all my things for free by pirating but now that I can afford it more I have no issue paying for it. Some interesting psychology going on I guess.
posted by Jalliah at 9:18 AM on August 17, 2015 [6 favorites]


It's the exact same for me, Jalliah. I'd much rather buy things I can afford, to support the creators and/or for the convenience of just saying "hey I want this" and then getting it. But if I hadn't been able to play around on a pirated version of Photoshop in my teens? I would not have any Photoshop skills, it wouldn't be on my resume, and that's at least two well-paying jobs that I probably wouldn't have gotten.
posted by easter queen at 11:28 AM on August 17, 2015 [1 favorite]


We already have the sliding scale model in place for some cultural goods. Podcasts and other forms of digital content are often available for free with the option to support them through Patreon. In terms of old-school culture, art museums and theaters with sliding scales and student/young person discounts allow people to access them cheaply or for free. Eventually these people may pay the asking price, or even donate additional money to support access for others. But these institutions are often nonprofits and are subsidized by the government and/or by rich old people who grew up around art and theater. It seems like we're just getting there with video games, and we still have this issue of thinking of digital goods as a completely separate cultural category from more traditional media.
posted by earth by april at 11:45 AM on August 17, 2015


fwiw, re: the download a car/bread -- 'it vs. bit' -- distinction, hal varian, google's now chief economist wrote (pre-google alphabet) the book on 'information economics': "The appropriate guiding principle in these contexts should be that the marginal willingness to pay should be equal to marginal cost."
posted by kliuless at 1:56 PM on August 17, 2015


I wish this got more into the media part as well. Basically all the interesting music i listened to in my teens, all the great(and especially independent or weird) films and foreign tv shows, etc.

Since i was homeschooled and basically a shut in, i spent all day just pirating shit on my computer and voraciously consuming interesting media between bouts of playing(yea, usually pirated) games or F2P MMOs.

Everyone i know pirated everything as well, because they just didn't have the disposable income to buy games or media. We even had swapdisc playstations and stuff that we had modded ourselves. Fuck, the operating systems our shitty pieced together computers ran were often pirated.

Photoshop is now in the cloud, making it harder to pirate

Hahahahah, nah. I just walked a friend through uh, installing it. Same as it's been for the past decade and a half at least. Someone else already did the legwork, you just follow a short list of instructions, click some boxes on a 1337 h4x0r tool at a few points, and you're golden.
posted by emptythought at 7:12 PM on August 17, 2015 [2 favorites]


On the note of dynamic pricing, I want to say I'm incredibly thankful to the Humble Indie Bundle team. My disposable entertainment budget for a month is generally below twenty dollars, aka thirty games, many of which have won awards, and several pretty interesting ebooks too. They've got Dark Souls for ten bucks right now, and it comes with like eight other games, three of which I recognize as great. Plus I can make a ton of that go to doctors without borders or a children's charity or something.
I don't begrudge anyone who doesn't own a yacht for casual piracy, but I'm grateful that some creators have noticed that people are desperate to pay whatever they can, even if it isn't 59.99 + two installments of 9.99 and that even at comical poverty I can feel a little useful to the interesting parts of the economy.

Anyway I'm torrenting the Tolkien edit of the hobbit movie(s) and I have to go see if it's any good now.
posted by sandswipe at 9:47 PM on August 17, 2015 [3 favorites]


Entire countries, including the US, have grown up on pirated IP (books, patents, etc.).

As has Hollywood itself, who set up shop in SF to get away from Edison and his patent cartel.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 9:55 PM on August 17, 2015 [3 favorites]


Point of order. I'm pretty sure they moved to SoCal (the Bay Area gets enough shit, we're not going to lay claim to Hollywood)
posted by MikeKD at 2:35 AM on August 22, 2015


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