Why people Pirate? · Elektrine

They don’t claim that, it’s their terms of service to begin with. Just another reason to never buy anything on these services. (I can feel my huge steam library giving my hypocritical ass mad side-eye right now)

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@cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2026-08-11 10:51

I know it doesn’t fit the Piracy narrative, but there’s actually more to this story. I’ve never actually heard this story, but at some point, Google gave everyone that same movie (The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring) for free. Anybody who saw the deal could claim it. I still have it. I’d gift it to this guy if I could, because I’ve since bought the extended edition trilogy in 4K. The Fellowship copy is locked to 1080p, and it’s the theatrical version. I have no reason to ever watch it. But I still have it. So I don’t know what happened with them losing the rights, but they did kinda try to make it right by offering a giveaway. It would have been awfully nice of them to email everyone who lost their original copy and tell them they could claim it, though. That rarely happens with giveaways. They had a few of them back then. I also got Happy Feet and Big, maybe one or two others. Make no mistake though. While I do have quite a nice collection of 4K movies in Apple TV (call them rentals if you want, but I won’t pay more than $5 for them, so rental is fair since I paid rental price), I have easily 10-15 times as many on my Plex server (not all 4K though, but still).

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@street689@lemmy.ml 2026-08-11 11:20

One of the reasons for pirating is that there are no ultimate and afordable source/s of all the content. By distributing the content, the risk of inaccessibility of it is decreased. That is why P2P networks like Gnutella, ED2K, Direct Connect, Soulseek and others are used.

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@puppygirlpets@hexbear.net 2026-08-11 11:23

'cos fuck 'em that’s why

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@unitedwithme@lemmy.today 2026-08-11 11:34

As Mr Krabs would say, “it’s not stealing, it’s borrowing. You can borrow anything you’d like as long as you give it back” So I’ll just “give back” all my copies I have obtained, before I die!

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@4am@lemmy.zip 2026-08-11 11:51

It’s never been stealing, it’s infringement of copyright, which aught to carry much less of a penalty since the original owner was not deprived of their property. But we live in hell, so capitalism literally bankrupts families when they film their kid dancing to music that was playing on a public broadcast on FM radio.

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@fizzle@quokk.au 2026-08-11 12:33

Firstly, I’ve never felt any need to justify piracy. If you can have something for free without harming anyone else then I just don’t see the problem. Secondly, I agree that piracy is not stealing. That said, I dont really see how googles behavior here is an argument in favor of piracy. If you’re stupid enough to “buy” a movie on a streaming platform and think it belongs to you then when they inevitably take it away that just means you’re an idiot. It doesn’t mean anything about piracy.

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@square@lemmy.zip 2026-08-11 12:53

Is this a region specific thing? I bought these years ago in HD, at some point Google automatically updated them to 4K, and they are still in my library. Should I expect these to disappear for me as well or did Google lose the ability to distribute it in certain countries/regions only?

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@Dippy@beehaw.org 2026-08-11 13:04

I just had to check if I still owned it on YouTube, i do. This caused a panic let me tell you

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@FreddiesLantern@leminal.space 2026-08-11 13:29

Don’t do business with google for starters. You just know you’re gonna get screwed one way or another.

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@SatansMaggotyCumFart@piefed.world 2026-08-11 13:51

Does that mean if someone steals a car you’re leasing that they did nothing wrong?

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@Hundun@beehaw.org 2026-08-11 14:02

Piracy isn’t stealing, period. It was totally ok to pirate movies before this practice ever took place. Information had always wanted to be free.

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@kamee@lemmy.zip 2026-08-11 14:34

Fun fact: in my country (Slovakia) it’s totally legal to download things. It’s the uploading it back that’s seen as illegal, so as long as you have a paid private torrent site where you can hit’n’run you are not breaking any laws.

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@BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 2026-08-11 15:54

I saw this coming long ago, back in the 80s, when record labels started to complain that public libraries didn’t have the right to lend their recordings, claiming that their ownership didn’t give them the right to lend it to others. They got shot down in court of course, but they just waited until the political environment would be more welcoming to their sociopathic policies. Pirate EVERYTHING!

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@UnrepententProcrastinator@lemmy.ca 2026-08-11 17:46

Piracy isn’t stealing, period. It was totally ok to pirate movies before this practice ever took place. Information had always wanted to be free.

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Replies (21)