Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Well, here's something I learned.

Years and years ago, I got two books in a series published by a tiny imprint that did zero marketing, and I was too noob to do any myself. Didn't sell shit. Had trouble even getting anyone to read the damn things.

Years pass. I get disabled, and make new friends. One of them asks to read the shit, so I send him some epub files I made for my own use.

He, being the awesome fucktard he is,promptly puts copies in his book folder. Which is one of the folders he shares via soulseek.

A few weeks later, I start getting emails from random people asking if the third book is available. My files have my author email in them, so it wasn't super confusing, but it did take a bit to figure out where the files came from for these strangers.

To date, more people have asked about the third book than ever read the printed version.

Now, would I rather have gotten paid for those reads? Fuck yeah. But, when I sent the small list of interested people a link to the series I'm currently publishing via amazon, maybe ten percent went and bought a copy of the file.

So, despite having had maybe fifty people "steal" my two books, those thefts resulted in sales anyway. Sales that I absolutely would not have gotten from those same people if they hadn't read and liked the older stuff.

Piracy is not some noble pursuit. But, realistically, it can be an advantage if you're small enough that it serves as advertising, or big enough that it won't decrease sales enough to matter monetarily. Mid range "creatives", though? They're going to be in a bad spot from it. The conversion from pirated works to sold works is fucking SMALL. It's small enough that if you're struggling to make enough income to create full time, you're fucked because you aren't going to get serious grass roots awareness pushing sales to bump you up like that. People are going to pirate instead of buying at that popularity level.

But me? I'm fine with it. My old books, I may put up on Amazon at some point, but since I am unlikely to finish the third in the series (which is a long story), I don't see the point. So, they're out there, and that makes me happy. Now, maybe once or twice a year, I get a new email. That, for a no name hack like me, is better than the chump change I'll ever get from Amazon.

I saw a post on reddit a while back from the developers of Ableton. Someone asked in the subreddit if they had permission to pirate the program because they are in high school still and don't have the money to purchase the $600+ program but really wanted to start making music using that DAW. A developer responded saying something along the lines of "We'd prefer you pirate our program to start learning and being creative instead of using another DAW. Then, when you start making a profit on your music you created with the pirated program set some aside and eventually purchase Ableton." This creates lifetime loyalty tbh. These developers know that they'd rather you use their programs via pirating because they know if those users like it enough they will eventually purchase it. This is exactly what I did. I pirated the program and released some songs until I hade the money to purchase it myself.

Piracy is responsible for anime taking off worldwide

It's a big lie that piracy has caused any drops in sale. I guess those who make such hollow claims, consider the whole planet earth population their potential paid customers.

We also get little conversation about how copyright extensions and patent trilling robs the public use of public-domain content, especially when the Mouse is lobbying the federal government to extend rights further.

Game preservation is something that's already actively biting us in the ass. Apparently the percentage of games that have been saved is on par with early silent motion pictures.

Even if we ensure all the critically acclaimed games are preserved, there's still heaps that are just going to vanish over time and that sucks for everyone.

God, City of Heroes is the perfect example of that, seeing private servers pop up...my childhood was back

Thanks to piracy, in the media history, prices had to adjust to the people's pockets. Buying an original CD in the 90s was really expensive. Then, because of it was just for rich people, thanks to piracy, prices fell and were more affordable. Even tho it was still expensive, then Napster and all preceding came, and we got Spotify. Which even tho is rental, you have a gigantic catalog and musicians would still get revenue even they were able to avoid the wall of publishers. So it was a two-way benefit. For games, we got steam after the big piracy of the 90s. If I see a title that has a reasonable price, I pay for it.

I just want to be able to play black and white\black and white 2 with out having to pirate and crack and do a bunch of work arounds.

(Okay really what I want is a black and white reboot using the PS5 and taking advantage of the duel sense touch pad for the spell casting)

I do believe in the numbers of being locked out without "piracy". The average person is mostly trying to watch TV and movies, even games, that are locked by region. That requires a VPN at a mostly legal level. Without it, the # of legal accounts would drop and would be more costly.

Piracy of old was the only way and now the new ways are going back to old. This time however, there are more official ways of getting things without sketchy sites. A VPN, modding or a cracked app isn't going to solve real piracy in the future if companies are letting untapped money sit out untouched.

I wish that older games were still available in some official capacity. There's nothing morally wrong with pirating a game that's no longer available for sale.

https://vimm.net/ - my favorite ROM resource

Mainly because it's impossible to tie a solid metric between piracy viewings and marketing impact, or at least it's difficult to the point where it hasn't been done yet. You'd need to have a pirate viewership metric tied to movie sales / streaming views and prove a correlation to assign a value that you can present to media executives.

Until that metric relationship is established in dollars and cents, the studios will ignore it, as there's no proof it's making them money. You'll note that recent releases and re-releases (cough Morbius) have spoken to the industry's ineptitude in reading underground internet trends - there's no way they'll ever look at piracy as a profit center unless you can smack them in the face with a large dollar figure.

I had to double take when I saw this. My favorite game ever (City of heroes) and I was so happy to watch the whole ordeal break down and then getting the game brought back and continuously updated by the community.

The main question for this argument that piracy does a lot of good is: are the people who are pirating things using it for this purpose? I don't think there's an ethical conflict for me to say that I am happy for piracy to exist for software that is otherwise unplayable, but think that piracy should not exist for new games that just come out.

Someone quoted a study that within the first 14 years is where most of the profitability comes from. Maybe I'd be okay with people pirating anything that's been around for 14 years, but I think most people who keep using this "pirating is good" line won't agree with this compromise.