Research papers. Don't get me started.
They're $30 a paper. Researches read 5 papers *before breakfast*. Where is all that money going?
Not the author. Researchers write papers for free.
Not the reviewers. Other researchers review them for free.
It's going to the publisher.
And then these same scientists have to pay said publishers exorbitant amounts to access other papers by their colleagues who also wrote and reviewed them for free.
And we must hand over copyright upon publishing, so the publisher can charge literally as much as they want for *our* work. What does the publisher even contribute to this process?
Formatting? The author does that.
Publishing? The papers are digital.
Distribution? We all use the internet.
Publishers curate. They read the papers, organise reviewers, select and reject papers, host them on their website, organise them into special editions, etc.
I'm not saying they shouldn't be paid. But man. The publishing industry has some of the highest profit margins ever (~36%, higher than Apple, Google or Amazon). It's straight up exploitation and gatekeeping of knowledge that should be *public* property.
So.... I'm not encouraging you to do this or anything, but all I'm saying is...there's a site. Called scihub. And no researcher will be angry at you for pirating their paper >.>
Edit: Some legal options as suggested in comments:
- email correspondence author directly
- ResearchGate
- Arxiv
I came across a post about the same thing. Researchers do not get paid for their shit, and they are mostly the ones giving huge sums of money for their research too. Imagine the time spent, methods, materials, etc., these are from the researchers. When you buy a paper online, the payment goes to the publisher, researchers get no credit other than being recognized in the paper.
A researcher once said that if you can contact a researcher and ask for a copy of the paper, most of them would give you a copy of the paper for free! And they are even happy to do so.
>if you can contact a researcher and ask for a copy of the paper, most of them would give you a copy of the paper for free! And they are even happy to do so
Absolutely true IME. More than anything we want people to read our papers!
Most of the time when I'm writing something I need to dig through at least 3 or 4 papers to find the one fact I want to reference so unfortunately it's not a feasible approach most of the time. ResearchGate is good if you can get a profile and quicker to retrieve stuff than Scihub. There's always that one pesky paper that needs getting from Scihub though
Games too. I was born in the early 90s so I grew up in elementary and middle school playing lots of need for speed games on the PS2. Most if not all of those games had PC releases as well that have better graphics and hold up much better today as a result but there is nowhere to buy them now besides used copies on eBay. It's actually a better user experience to just pirate them because most of those old copies end up having problems because of the old DRM. It would be so easy for EA to just re release the old versions of the games with a few quality of life updates to make them play more nicely with modern hardware and display resolutions, people like me who are nostalgic for those games would happily pay 15 bucks for copy that I didn't have pirate or do a bunch of tweaking to get running properly.
yup.
just the other day: "oh can you do this as a hotfix? shouldn't take you more than half a day." three days later...
but then again sometimes it's: "can you change this string on the DB? it's kinda urgent but we understand if it might take a few days."
Bingo. If I can't buy it, I'll get it however I can. They could have sold it to me, but if they opt out and I still want it, that's their decision, not mine.
Most legal scholars would disagree, but in my head if you're no longer selling it, that's your way of saying you don't care how it's sourced since you no longer care about profiting off it. I'm not buying a $59.95 game that's 1 teeny little bit better than the old one you could still sell all day for $29.95 but have abandoned because you want to be indignant and push sales to your more expensive game. I've seen very few game additions worth $30 in franchise games.
If the publisher no longer cares, as far as I'm concerned that's a forfeit to public domain and free license to get it however you can get it.
(Additionally, let's not kid ourselves here...especially with games, you'll be getting it off some janky sus AF website and may be getting a buttload of malware, ransomware, and viruses with it, many of which can be insidious and hard to remove. If my choices were to go that route or pay a reasonable price for an old and unsupported game I want, with the clear understanding "don't ask us nothing, we don't support it, we don't do tech on it, you figure it out" I'd still happily pay to 1, get the game I want and actually get it instead of some crap that happens to have the right file size to look legit, 2, avoid the malware risks. Even one sale would likely cover the usage of the miniscule amount of server space it'd occupy and the company would be in free profits with every sale thereafter.)
I spent the first half of reading your comment thinking you were talking specifically about bingo, and was confused but impressed by how passionate you were about bingo.
I get ads for, pirated I'm sure, copies on Facebook all the time. You probably aren't missing anything great. I had a Disney storybook with record of the story or Brer Rabbit and I understand why people aren't too keen on it. I was a little kid, and for years, I assumed that (Infant made from a sticky petroleum substance) was a thing in the story and not a racial slur. I was rather shocked when I discovered the truth, and wondered why the hell my mom gave me that book with no explanation.
So I am NOT a historian, but the way I understand it and was taught it growing up was that this one is **complicated**.
Feel free to do your research yourself, but the short of it is there is basically no contemporaneous attestation to "Tar baby" EVER being used as a racial slur... it's certainly been used as such POST Song of the South, but apparently that's more to do with the fact it simply "sounds like a racial slur" than having anything to do with the story.
...and as for the story itself? (or more specifically "The Uncle Remus Stories"?) They were actually **applauded** by African American groups contemporaneously. They recorded quite faithfully the stories of an oral tradition that many feared might simply disappear and packaged them in a way that had "white folks" elevating them as traditional American stories alongside Paul Bunyan or whatever.
...also, Roosevelt (not that Roosevelt, but he was a politician and part of the same family) tended mostly towards the stories that had the slaves pulling successful tricks off on their dumb masters. You know... fighting prevaling stereotypes of the day and all that.
Is Song of the South "racist"? Well, it's certainly not very fucking **sensitive** by today's standards... but *historically* it seems to have been at least somewhat liberal for its day.
It's no fucking Huck Finn, but it DOES seem to be playing the same sport.
$0.02
EDIT: Now those racist-ass crows in Dumbo on the other hand are hard to watch. [Like the Mills Brothers doing Caravan without the sarcasm, gravitas, or epic breakdancing.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14QEoEIvUuk)
Anything you find flagged as "This product is not available in your region."
If I wrote a bestselling book, and found that the publisher for some reason didn't sell it at all in, say, Canada, I'd be enthusiastic about Canadians pirating it. Less so in countries where the book was actually being sold.
*Cries in Irish* we get similar treatment because of being next to the UK. So much is over inflated cost wise or not available because hurr durr Uk market big.
As a kiwi who moved to Australia before Netflix was a thing, the massive increase in the availability of things was astonishing. I imagine a similar level of 'whoa' moving from Australia to US/EU.
Same!! I find this with foreign music sometimes. It's frustrating when there are zero sources I can purchase it online or order a CD from, because I'd like to support the band. But good thing there is thepiratebay!
Yeah, don't get mad at me for pirating a SNES game and running an emulator to play it, Nintendo! When was the last time you even made a SNES cartridge?
I personally pirate anything i want that for whatever reason isn't available to purchase in my country.
Like I'll GIVE you money for this, but if you won't let me I'll just steal it until you give the option .
He's totally right. For example, I recently got an ereader and have been getting a lot of ebooks. When getting them from a library, you have to send it through a variety of devices (download it on a computer, send it to a phone to use Adobe Digital Editions, send it back to the computer, send it to the ereader). Furthermore, since they almost all have DRM (even public domain books), they cannot be accessed on an open source reader app like KOReader. At this point, I just remove the DRM before sending it to the ereader. It's technically illegal, but I delete my DRM-less copy after returning the book, so I don't think it has any moral issues. To contrast, from piracy, you just download the book and send it to the ereader. Everything then works. I still try to use the library, but I can totally understand why people would just pirate.
That’s kind of funny, at my college a bunch of the professors litteraly just made photo copies of the books and would only charge us for the paper, it was awsome
i worked at a print shop once.
this college prof came in with a box of books, and a list of the pages he wanted from each book in his textbook.
i scanned them all, put them in the order he wanted, made a bibliography and bound them into books for him.
he paid out of pocket instead of through the school that we already had a contract with anyways so that he could give them to the students for free. then, because i had showed him interest in the topic, he gave me one for free too.
he was fucking awesome. clearly had enough money and was happy to pay it forward. i feel like the bill for \~30 books was \~$2000 and he was happy to pay it. it was like, a week of work for me and it may have been my favourite week at that job.
I was in that boat. I had a professor who required his own book that he had not completed yet and we had to buy an incomplete version from the university bookstore that was soft cover and all black and white with chapters missing. I thought that was pretty shady.
That’s incredibly weird
My IT law professor assigned us his own book. I bought it, hated it & returned it. Then we found out a brother of a classmate had this professor once. He disliked him so much that he copied the entire book out of spite. He sent us all pdf files :)
Edit: we had to do an assignment at home for this course, so that’s why having the book did come in handy. I just didn’t feel like paying him 60 euros for it
This was infuriating. Especially when the book was only published by some obscure publisher, and so even if you opted not to get it from the college bookstore it would still cost an insane amount. Thank goodness for libgen et al.
How much was it? I think it'd be okay if you're just paying the printing costs (like $10 or so). I'd be incensed if they tried to sell some Kinko's garbage for $200.
I had a professor do the same kind of thing. It was more like $20, he said it was the best price he could get to have it printed. It was also a workbook for the course.
He assured us that he wasn't profiting off the book, and it doubled as notes for the final. It was a good deal compared to all the other books I had to buy.
That's the worst. I had a professor assign a (shitty) book he wrote and he required a report about the book as one of our major assignments. I decided to be critical of it and even called him out in front of the class for putting too many of his personal opinions in parentheses in each chapter when they didn't belong. He pissed me off earlier in the semester so I may have been too vocal lol
He just kinda chuckled when I criticized it out loud. I ended up passing with the highest grade in the class and got an A on the paper too. It was a history class which is my strong suit, so I had no worries.
I've always thought that if a professor was going to require a book they wrote themself for their classes, they should be obligated to provide those books for free to the entire class. It's scummy as fuck otherwise.
Almost all textbooks are written by professors. It would make no sense for them to write one and then use one someone else wrote. If they weren't allowed to use the ones they write, there would be none left in a few years since people would stop writing them.
Publishers usually won't let them give them away, which sucks. I think the universities should offer a discount from the bookstore to knock off the amount from the price that the professor earns from each sale. It's not a lot usually, but would remove the profit from the equation that feels scummy.
Professors who self publish work because nobody will actually publish it, that they require students to buy, really need to adopt an actual vetted, reviewed text. The quality in those self-published books is abysmal.
By far the best answer, i would add research papers to the list, paying more than 50 usd monthly is a pain in the butt when youre in college or residency.
I worked in a college office for a while. Publishers are required to put at least 2 years between editions, so what they do is, list the new edition year ahead of time, meaning the books that student will need for their upcoming fall classes already say 2023 on them. In 6 years, I saw 4 editions of a text- and there were no real differences in basic content, just extra graphic, charts and review questions to skew page numbers.
I’ve heard legends of college professors who assign their own textbooks as reading material and then “accidentally” release a sneaky link to where it can be found online for free. I have to admit, if I was in that position I’d probably do the same, those books can be wildly too expensive.
I had a prof who passed out his own book on floppy disks. There was a 10 question quiz every class. The answers to the quizzes were included in the book. The questions to those quizzes were the question bank for the mid-term and final exam. He might have come across as arrogant and pissed off all day, but he cared.
You have used up all 3 installations on your PC and cannot install the game again, even if you had to reinstall it each time because it failed to install.
I forgot about that! Even if you replaced core parts, upgrade a cpu, or gpu and those were strikes against you. It's like, what? am I smuggling your game piece by piece to Slovakia?
Software DRM has never prevented people from pirating it. I don't know why they even try at this point.
Maybe use that budget to present something that will actually compel the user to buy your product?
I still have securom on an old hard drive that has probably been through about four computers from the sims 2. Years later my husband who is my IT support discovered this little folder I had renamed "empty but won't delete" and he freaked out and said it was a virus. Nope, just securom.
One of the first games I ever bought online was a niche sprintcar game. Its protection was that you could install it but then it would phone home for activation. Well guess which company went bust and turned off their servers a year later.
Everyone I know who is now a paying customer proficient in Adobe and uses it for professional work started out pirating it. They became a professional in it *because* it was easy to pirate.
I remember, when I was 13, Adobe ran a campaign that was imploring their users to buy, but ended in a statement along the lines of “well, if you really can’t afford it, then maybe some other time.”
At the time, I was one of those “some other time” users, and now I pay monthly for a CC master license, because I’m familiar with the product from a young age, and it’s well worth what you get if you’re using it in a professional capacity.
They clearly have the resources to write effective licensing lockouts, but I suspect they don’t do it because long-term piracy breeds well-trained professionals, which eventually leads to additional subscribers.
My brother works in the TV graphics industry. A couple of decades ago he installed 3D Studio Max on my PC for shits and giggles. Told me the program cost (the equivalent of) 10,000€ at the time. So about 8 times as much as the PC itself.
You know whats even more infuriating? Even if you subscribed, but you dont have internet, there will be error that says subscription cant be verified, and you wont be able to use your adobe programs. I asked their support team about it, the reason they gave me is because cloud.
Good luck to all those who wants work if you dont have internet! They literally are asking you to pirate them at this point.
I didn't really know anything about certain softwares a couple of years back, so I signed up for Adobe because I needed some program that they had (can't remember)
My dumbass didn't read the fine print about what happens if you don't cancel before the trial ends. You get billed $16.99 monthly, & if you attempt to cancel the membership, you're forced to pay some kinda' "remainder of the contract", which can be $70, $90, hell 100? Idk.
Literally had to cancel my debit card to finally get them to stop taking money from me.
Main reason why i just kept to the latest non subscription version, pirated a copy, and never put it online. The new features are not worth the bs subscription, when i just use it for meme edits, as a side hobby, anyways.
anything with DRM that makes it measurably less convenient to use as a legitimate owner than as a pirate
and things you can't buy (abandonware/really fucking old movies/etc)
reminder that legal piracy is distribution, not consumption. downloading pirated content is a-ok from a legal standpoint, distributing (which includes torrent seeding) is the part thats against the law (this not legal advice)
EDIT: things that exist and are being maintained but not being sold due to some marketing bullshit also count as things you can't buy (talking about disney vault and that dumb shit) if you will offer me a price for it ill probably pay for it but if you're like "no you cant have it" then you didnt even lose a customer because you werent willing to give me it in the first place
Adobe products. They are not worth the cost but often a necessity for students and young professionals for no reason other then arbitrary industry standards.
I say if you're gunna have to buy it for school or work, pirate it first and get a head start. I moved on from Adobe now that I don't need it and I've been happy to pay only like $60 for other great products.
I am an aspiring animator who learned on Adobe Animate in school, but alas, I am poor, and do not possess the sacred knowledge. I have several questions…
Had all the features I needed back in 2016! Absolutely hate CC. Bloated crap.
The only way I don’t lose my mind is to use their portfolio site builder. It’s not half bad. But watch them turn that into a secondary product.
Yes, but its worth noting that a lot of those patented plants are hybrids, so collected seeds generally won't give you the same results as the ones bought from their manufacturer.
Music by artists that are long dead… or even pirate any music you want BUT at least buy some merchandise, a concert ticket or an album. It’s better to steal an artists’ entire discography but purchase one of their albums than use streaming services.
At this point most streaming stuff, there’s so many different platforms you can’t really keep track of your favourite shows at this point, without going broke.
Also sports, paying to watch your team nowadays on what used to be on regular antena TV, it’s a bunch of bullshit, specially when you can’t see away games.
We subscribe to a few different streaming services and I still end up torrenting a lot of what we want to watch because it is easier than finding where it is available.
Also, at least amazon has this annoying feature that even if something is not available with prime video, it will show up when you search and when you click on it to watch, you are then told that you need to sign up for some other level of prime to view it.
I hate when I google ‘where can I watch x’. Oh it’s available on Hulu with a subscription. Okay I have that let me just open Hulu. Nope! Need that showtime add-on we tricked yo ass!
I mean even if you pirate their latest games with dlc and all that stuff it ain't gonna be really worth it anyways just waste of space cause them and Ubisoft really forgot how to make fun games
The Sims 2 isn't even available for digital download anymore. The only way to play it legally is to track down all the physical disks on ebay which is a pain and the money doesn't even go to EA anyway. Every time someone asks me where to get it, I say just pirate it
At this point, I'm more interested in how one pirates *food*.
Do you just mean, like swiping it, all Jean Valjean and stuff, or do you mean the much more horrendous crime of copyright infringement, like calling your homemade egg-and-sausage English-muffin breakfast sandwich a "McMuffin" out loud.
You're right but not for ethical reasons. I wouldn't only because I don't know how. If I could download a sandwich, I wouldn't have to leave my computer to eat
I had a perfectly legal copy of Microsoft Office 2019, but I got it through downloading. I had the product key for it still. Then I had computer issues and had to reset it, which got rid of Microsoft Office 2019. I tried to get it reinstalled, but every time I tried to, it kept insisting I pay for Microsoft Office 365 subscription service.
What was my solution? Download a pirated version of Microsoft office 2019 because my legal copy was not allowed to be installed because they insist I pay for the stupid subscription fee for Microsoft Office 365.
Anything that is priced far above fair value. It's literally the only way to counter act the price gouging of streaming services. Piracy almost died when Netflix first started because believe it or not people are willing to pay fair value. But as prices began to grow and streaming services started to monopolized content, piracy is now becoming popular again.
In a capitalist society where companies are free to set whatever price they want and consumers are forced to pay. Piracy is the only means consumers have to fight back.
Yeah. Back then Netflix had almost everything so it was an easy choice. Now I need to Google search which streaming service has this particular movie then determine if it is available in my country followed by which streaming platform it is on. Oh no it's on HBO Max and I don't have access to it here.
I may as well pirate it at top notch quality to my Plex server and create my own streaming library for convenience.
Abandonware games.
If I can't legally pay the publisher/developer for their product because they've removed it from purchase, then I'm sorry but pirating becomes okay in my eyes. Especially since buying the product used doesn't give money to the publisher either. And can often run into the hundreds of dollars for popular titles like the Silent Hill franchise.
I wish publisher's would start re-releasing their old titles or partner with rom makers to host them online. I WANT to pay you guys, but damn if you don't make it impossible sometimes. (Especially Nintendo...)
Content not available in your country.
Like, if you give me a chance to pay for it, sure, I will.
But if you don’t even let me do that, then I’ll just take it.
Textbooks, academic books and research papers.
Scumbag publishers are no better than big pharma; heartless a\*holes burdening the already debt-ridden student population with their ridiculous pricing.
Idk about "ok" but I've come to realize that with every big company having their own streaming service, I will not pay for any of them.
I have my own streaming service (Plex) and that shit had a one-time fee.
Small publisher content
Fuck Disney I'll pirate the fuck out of them
But I don't have the heart to pirate dropout.tv shows or rulebooks for small ttrpg publishers
movies made by big companies. I'm sure warner bros and shit suffer tremendously when i pirate one of their movies once a year or so. to be fair, i worked hard for it fair and square - bypassing the porn ads on those illegal websites is hard work.
Growing up it was just normal to get movies that way, but recently, after reading a bit about some movies, I lost any empathy regarding not financing the disastrous horror stories gathered from actors, vfx studios, artists, on set staff and how they are treated by producers. I'm not financing that. I know it's a demanding industry and everybody wants a piece of it, but let's be real: if it took 2 more weeks of shooting instead of doing those 16hrs rushes or 6 days work weeks for no valid reason, we wouldn't know, but that's what they do.
BTW that's how Reacher was shot. 6 days a week over 3 months. It's not tolerable.
Disney movies and tv shows. Everyone who worked on them is paid up front, so you're just putting money into an evil company. Remember kids: it's not stealing if it's from a multi billion dollar corporation!
Research papers. Don't get me started. They're $30 a paper. Researches read 5 papers *before breakfast*. Where is all that money going? Not the author. Researchers write papers for free. Not the reviewers. Other researchers review them for free. It's going to the publisher. And then these same scientists have to pay said publishers exorbitant amounts to access other papers by their colleagues who also wrote and reviewed them for free. And we must hand over copyright upon publishing, so the publisher can charge literally as much as they want for *our* work. What does the publisher even contribute to this process? Formatting? The author does that. Publishing? The papers are digital. Distribution? We all use the internet. Publishers curate. They read the papers, organise reviewers, select and reject papers, host them on their website, organise them into special editions, etc. I'm not saying they shouldn't be paid. But man. The publishing industry has some of the highest profit margins ever (~36%, higher than Apple, Google or Amazon). It's straight up exploitation and gatekeeping of knowledge that should be *public* property. So.... I'm not encouraging you to do this or anything, but all I'm saying is...there's a site. Called scihub. And no researcher will be angry at you for pirating their paper >.> Edit: Some legal options as suggested in comments: - email correspondence author directly - ResearchGate - Arxiv
Indeed. Who do you think is uploading all those papers to scihub in the first place?
IIRC sci-hub actually skims papers from private journals.
I came across a post about the same thing. Researchers do not get paid for their shit, and they are mostly the ones giving huge sums of money for their research too. Imagine the time spent, methods, materials, etc., these are from the researchers. When you buy a paper online, the payment goes to the publisher, researchers get no credit other than being recognized in the paper. A researcher once said that if you can contact a researcher and ask for a copy of the paper, most of them would give you a copy of the paper for free! And they are even happy to do so.
>if you can contact a researcher and ask for a copy of the paper, most of them would give you a copy of the paper for free! And they are even happy to do so Absolutely true IME. More than anything we want people to read our papers!
Most of the time when I'm writing something I need to dig through at least 3 or 4 papers to find the one fact I want to reference so unfortunately it's not a feasible approach most of the time. ResearchGate is good if you can get a profile and quicker to retrieve stuff than Scihub. There's always that one pesky paper that needs getting from Scihub though
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A day later. Or a week or never if they're busy. It adds so much overhead :(
Abandonware. Movies and books that are no longer being published.
Games too. I was born in the early 90s so I grew up in elementary and middle school playing lots of need for speed games on the PS2. Most if not all of those games had PC releases as well that have better graphics and hold up much better today as a result but there is nowhere to buy them now besides used copies on eBay. It's actually a better user experience to just pirate them because most of those old copies end up having problems because of the old DRM. It would be so easy for EA to just re release the old versions of the games with a few quality of life updates to make them play more nicely with modern hardware and display resolutions, people like me who are nostalgic for those games would happily pay 15 bucks for copy that I didn't have pirate or do a bunch of tweaking to get running properly.
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As a developer it's so funny to me how people always either *extremely* overestimate or underestimate how complex software problems are.
And often get them exactly backwards.
yup. just the other day: "oh can you do this as a hotfix? shouldn't take you more than half a day." three days later... but then again sometimes it's: "can you change this string on the DB? it's kinda urgent but we understand if it might take a few days."
You don't even always have to really [pirate it](https://www.myabandonware.com/) sometimes it's easy to get
Bingo. If I can't buy it, I'll get it however I can. They could have sold it to me, but if they opt out and I still want it, that's their decision, not mine. Most legal scholars would disagree, but in my head if you're no longer selling it, that's your way of saying you don't care how it's sourced since you no longer care about profiting off it. I'm not buying a $59.95 game that's 1 teeny little bit better than the old one you could still sell all day for $29.95 but have abandoned because you want to be indignant and push sales to your more expensive game. I've seen very few game additions worth $30 in franchise games. If the publisher no longer cares, as far as I'm concerned that's a forfeit to public domain and free license to get it however you can get it. (Additionally, let's not kid ourselves here...especially with games, you'll be getting it off some janky sus AF website and may be getting a buttload of malware, ransomware, and viruses with it, many of which can be insidious and hard to remove. If my choices were to go that route or pay a reasonable price for an old and unsupported game I want, with the clear understanding "don't ask us nothing, we don't support it, we don't do tech on it, you figure it out" I'd still happily pay to 1, get the game I want and actually get it instead of some crap that happens to have the right file size to look legit, 2, avoid the malware risks. Even one sale would likely cover the usage of the miniscule amount of server space it'd occupy and the company would be in free profits with every sale thereafter.)
I spent the first half of reading your comment thinking you were talking specifically about bingo, and was confused but impressed by how passionate you were about bingo.
‘Bingo. If I can't buy it, I'll get it however I can.‘ Man is seriously addicted to bingo.
Someday I would like to watch Song of the South, and pirating might be the only way to do that
I get ads for, pirated I'm sure, copies on Facebook all the time. You probably aren't missing anything great. I had a Disney storybook with record of the story or Brer Rabbit and I understand why people aren't too keen on it. I was a little kid, and for years, I assumed that (Infant made from a sticky petroleum substance) was a thing in the story and not a racial slur. I was rather shocked when I discovered the truth, and wondered why the hell my mom gave me that book with no explanation.
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Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah is fricken great. My grandma used to sing it to me.
So I am NOT a historian, but the way I understand it and was taught it growing up was that this one is **complicated**. Feel free to do your research yourself, but the short of it is there is basically no contemporaneous attestation to "Tar baby" EVER being used as a racial slur... it's certainly been used as such POST Song of the South, but apparently that's more to do with the fact it simply "sounds like a racial slur" than having anything to do with the story. ...and as for the story itself? (or more specifically "The Uncle Remus Stories"?) They were actually **applauded** by African American groups contemporaneously. They recorded quite faithfully the stories of an oral tradition that many feared might simply disappear and packaged them in a way that had "white folks" elevating them as traditional American stories alongside Paul Bunyan or whatever. ...also, Roosevelt (not that Roosevelt, but he was a politician and part of the same family) tended mostly towards the stories that had the slaves pulling successful tricks off on their dumb masters. You know... fighting prevaling stereotypes of the day and all that. Is Song of the South "racist"? Well, it's certainly not very fucking **sensitive** by today's standards... but *historically* it seems to have been at least somewhat liberal for its day. It's no fucking Huck Finn, but it DOES seem to be playing the same sport. $0.02 EDIT: Now those racist-ass crows in Dumbo on the other hand are hard to watch. [Like the Mills Brothers doing Caravan without the sarcasm, gravitas, or epic breakdancing.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14QEoEIvUuk)
Anything you find flagged as "This product is not available in your region." If I wrote a bestselling book, and found that the publisher for some reason didn't sell it at all in, say, Canada, I'd be enthusiastic about Canadians pirating it. Less so in countries where the book was actually being sold.
As an Australian I feel this on such a deep level. Shit not being available in our region is like part of our cultural identity
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And then they say "oh it's not very profitable in Australia, the market must be too small, we can delay the next release there", and repeat.
*Cries in Irish* we get similar treatment because of being next to the UK. So much is over inflated cost wise or not available because hurr durr Uk market big.
Can't have shit in Australia I guess
As a kiwi who moved to Australia before Netflix was a thing, the massive increase in the availability of things was astonishing. I imagine a similar level of 'whoa' moving from Australia to US/EU.
Do you have anything not available in my region? Sincerely, Canuck eating poutine, kinda bored
Poutine isn’t available in my region, can I pirate some of yours?
How are you bored while eating poutine?
Same!! I find this with foreign music sometimes. It's frustrating when there are zero sources I can purchase it online or order a CD from, because I'd like to support the band. But good thing there is thepiratebay!
Anything that is not made readily available by its parent company, yet is still policed for copyright by said parent company
*Glares at Nintendo*
Legally you can rip the ROMs off switch cartridges and send those ROMs to your Steam Deck. Nintendo doesn’t like it, but that’s a them problem.
Oooo how
https://youtu.be/oIYvPNtWZ34
Nintendo: “Stop emulating our GameCube games!” Me: “Okay, then re-release them and I’ll buy them.” Nintendo: “No, fuck you!”
Yeah, don't get mad at me for pirating a SNES game and running an emulator to play it, Nintendo! When was the last time you even made a SNES cartridge?
Treasure ships. That's kinda the whole point.
Yarr!
I guess it's a pirate's life for me!
We're bullies and bandits and brigands and thieves Drink up, me hearties, yo ho!
Old, out of production video games. You're not hurting anything or anyone.
Nintendo: *cocks shotgun*
My friend has a policy of only pirating the work of Scientologists. Might not be a perfect system but it’s close.
If you add pedophiles to your list that would mean it would be okay to pirate most movies and more.
That's why I only listen to lostprophets and Gary Glitter.
I feel a little ill now.
Pirating the productions of pedophiles would put you in quite a few watchlists and eventually in jail tho.
I think he meant to say "A lot of producers in Hollywood are peds", but I get where your coming from.
That's a fairly extensive movie collection at the very least.
I personally pirate anything i want that for whatever reason isn't available to purchase in my country. Like I'll GIVE you money for this, but if you won't let me I'll just steal it until you give the option .
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"Piracy is a service problem." - Gabe Newell
He's totally right. For example, I recently got an ereader and have been getting a lot of ebooks. When getting them from a library, you have to send it through a variety of devices (download it on a computer, send it to a phone to use Adobe Digital Editions, send it back to the computer, send it to the ereader). Furthermore, since they almost all have DRM (even public domain books), they cannot be accessed on an open source reader app like KOReader. At this point, I just remove the DRM before sending it to the ereader. It's technically illegal, but I delete my DRM-less copy after returning the book, so I don't think it has any moral issues. To contrast, from piracy, you just download the book and send it to the ereader. Everything then works. I still try to use the library, but I can totally understand why people would just pirate.
College textbooks
Especially if a professor assigns a book they wrote themselves.
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That’s kind of funny, at my college a bunch of the professors litteraly just made photo copies of the books and would only charge us for the paper, it was awsome
i worked at a print shop once. this college prof came in with a box of books, and a list of the pages he wanted from each book in his textbook. i scanned them all, put them in the order he wanted, made a bibliography and bound them into books for him. he paid out of pocket instead of through the school that we already had a contract with anyways so that he could give them to the students for free. then, because i had showed him interest in the topic, he gave me one for free too. he was fucking awesome. clearly had enough money and was happy to pay it forward. i feel like the bill for \~30 books was \~$2000 and he was happy to pay it. it was like, a week of work for me and it may have been my favourite week at that job.
Yeah I would say majority of my professors who assigned books they wrote showed us all where to pirate them
Howard _has_ to be related to Jeremy DeWitt
I was in that boat. I had a professor who required his own book that he had not completed yet and we had to buy an incomplete version from the university bookstore that was soft cover and all black and white with chapters missing. I thought that was pretty shady.
That’s incredibly weird My IT law professor assigned us his own book. I bought it, hated it & returned it. Then we found out a brother of a classmate had this professor once. He disliked him so much that he copied the entire book out of spite. He sent us all pdf files :) Edit: we had to do an assignment at home for this course, so that’s why having the book did come in handy. I just didn’t feel like paying him 60 euros for it
what a fucking bro
This was infuriating. Especially when the book was only published by some obscure publisher, and so even if you opted not to get it from the college bookstore it would still cost an insane amount. Thank goodness for libgen et al.
How much was it? I think it'd be okay if you're just paying the printing costs (like $10 or so). I'd be incensed if they tried to sell some Kinko's garbage for $200.
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$10 no problem, but when they start asking for the kinda money that threatens the pizza budget we got problems.
Oh god, not the pizza budget. That’s serious stuff
Oh god or even worse, sends you directly into the instant noodle budget…
$10 is a great deal!! I’d be totally okay with that
I had a professor do the same kind of thing. It was more like $20, he said it was the best price he could get to have it printed. It was also a workbook for the course. He assured us that he wasn't profiting off the book, and it doubled as notes for the final. It was a good deal compared to all the other books I had to buy.
That's the worst. I had a professor assign a (shitty) book he wrote and he required a report about the book as one of our major assignments. I decided to be critical of it and even called him out in front of the class for putting too many of his personal opinions in parentheses in each chapter when they didn't belong. He pissed me off earlier in the semester so I may have been too vocal lol
How'd that go?
He just kinda chuckled when I criticized it out loud. I ended up passing with the highest grade in the class and got an A on the paper too. It was a history class which is my strong suit, so I had no worries.
He assigned his own crappy book but at least he took his lumps. A true academic.
I've always thought that if a professor was going to require a book they wrote themself for their classes, they should be obligated to provide those books for free to the entire class. It's scummy as fuck otherwise.
Almost all textbooks are written by professors. It would make no sense for them to write one and then use one someone else wrote. If they weren't allowed to use the ones they write, there would be none left in a few years since people would stop writing them. Publishers usually won't let them give them away, which sucks. I think the universities should offer a discount from the bookstore to knock off the amount from the price that the professor earns from each sale. It's not a lot usually, but would remove the profit from the equation that feels scummy. Professors who self publish work because nobody will actually publish it, that they require students to buy, really need to adopt an actual vetted, reviewed text. The quality in those self-published books is abysmal.
By far the best answer, i would add research papers to the list, paying more than 50 usd monthly is a pain in the butt when youre in college or residency.
I believe if you reach out to the author they'd be happy to share their research. I don't think they get any of that money.
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I worked in a college office for a while. Publishers are required to put at least 2 years between editions, so what they do is, list the new edition year ahead of time, meaning the books that student will need for their upcoming fall classes already say 2023 on them. In 6 years, I saw 4 editions of a text- and there were no real differences in basic content, just extra graphic, charts and review questions to skew page numbers.
it's like the publishers are bullshitting an assignment lol
I’ve heard legends of college professors who assign their own textbooks as reading material and then “accidentally” release a sneaky link to where it can be found online for free. I have to admit, if I was in that position I’d probably do the same, those books can be wildly too expensive.
I had a prof who passed out his own book on floppy disks. There was a 10 question quiz every class. The answers to the quizzes were included in the book. The questions to those quizzes were the question bank for the mid-term and final exam. He might have come across as arrogant and pissed off all day, but he cared.
Anything that isn't being sold anymore. Then it's not piracy, it's salvaging.
Software that has drm protection so aggressive that it causes issues with the application or computer running it
You have used up all 3 installations on your PC and cannot install the game again, even if you had to reinstall it each time because it failed to install.
I forgot about that! Even if you replaced core parts, upgrade a cpu, or gpu and those were strikes against you. It's like, what? am I smuggling your game piece by piece to Slovakia?
And that's when you sail the sea of thieves to fix a product you bought that doesn't work.
Software DRM has never prevented people from pirating it. I don't know why they even try at this point. Maybe use that budget to present something that will actually compel the user to buy your product?
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ah yes, the "good" ol securom and not so ol denuvo
I still have securom on an old hard drive that has probably been through about four computers from the sims 2. Years later my husband who is my IT support discovered this little folder I had renamed "empty but won't delete" and he freaked out and said it was a virus. Nope, just securom.
Yeah, 'let's protect our game with a third party app that basically attacks the user computer at the kernel level, they shouldn't mind that right?'
One of the first games I ever bought online was a niche sprintcar game. Its protection was that you could install it but then it would phone home for activation. Well guess which company went bust and turned off their servers a year later.
Software from Adobe...
Everyone I know who is now a paying customer proficient in Adobe and uses it for professional work started out pirating it. They became a professional in it *because* it was easy to pirate.
I remember, when I was 13, Adobe ran a campaign that was imploring their users to buy, but ended in a statement along the lines of “well, if you really can’t afford it, then maybe some other time.” At the time, I was one of those “some other time” users, and now I pay monthly for a CC master license, because I’m familiar with the product from a young age, and it’s well worth what you get if you’re using it in a professional capacity. They clearly have the resources to write effective licensing lockouts, but I suspect they don’t do it because long-term piracy breeds well-trained professionals, which eventually leads to additional subscribers.
I'm convinced this is why FL Studio is so popular
This is how Microsoft built their empire after all.
Like 20$ per month for Photoshop?! BRO YOU CAN'T EVEN OWN THE PROGRAM, you have to keep paying forever
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And then there's CADs, costing 10k+ per year for a program. Useful, but holy shit that's expensive.
Related, I used to bootleg 3D modeling and rendering programs. Just the fact that I was using something that cost thousands of dollars was cool to me.
artistapirata.com rules
My brother works in the TV graphics industry. A couple of decades ago he installed 3D Studio Max on my PC for shits and giggles. Told me the program cost (the equivalent of) 10,000€ at the time. So about 8 times as much as the PC itself.
Being an architect can be very expensive if you have to legally own all of the software needed
You know whats even more infuriating? Even if you subscribed, but you dont have internet, there will be error that says subscription cant be verified, and you wont be able to use your adobe programs. I asked their support team about it, the reason they gave me is because cloud. Good luck to all those who wants work if you dont have internet! They literally are asking you to pirate them at this point.
I know right!, it's so infuriating
I didn't really know anything about certain softwares a couple of years back, so I signed up for Adobe because I needed some program that they had (can't remember) My dumbass didn't read the fine print about what happens if you don't cancel before the trial ends. You get billed $16.99 monthly, & if you attempt to cancel the membership, you're forced to pay some kinda' "remainder of the contract", which can be $70, $90, hell 100? Idk. Literally had to cancel my debit card to finally get them to stop taking money from me.
Sounds like they take advice on their subscription model from gym owners
You mean check cashing and payday loan establishments
Main reason why i just kept to the latest non subscription version, pirated a copy, and never put it online. The new features are not worth the bs subscription, when i just use it for meme edits, as a side hobby, anyways.
CS 2 v9 Last free version I believe
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Where do you get these?? I’ve looked everywhere
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anything with DRM that makes it measurably less convenient to use as a legitimate owner than as a pirate and things you can't buy (abandonware/really fucking old movies/etc) reminder that legal piracy is distribution, not consumption. downloading pirated content is a-ok from a legal standpoint, distributing (which includes torrent seeding) is the part thats against the law (this not legal advice) EDIT: things that exist and are being maintained but not being sold due to some marketing bullshit also count as things you can't buy (talking about disney vault and that dumb shit) if you will offer me a price for it ill probably pay for it but if you're like "no you cant have it" then you didnt even lose a customer because you werent willing to give me it in the first place
Adobe products. They are not worth the cost but often a necessity for students and young professionals for no reason other then arbitrary industry standards. I say if you're gunna have to buy it for school or work, pirate it first and get a head start. I moved on from Adobe now that I don't need it and I've been happy to pay only like $60 for other great products.
Just pirate adobe products and stick with them. Still using Adobe AE 2020 in 2022
I am an aspiring animator who learned on Adobe Animate in school, but alas, I am poor, and do not possess the sacred knowledge. I have several questions…
Psssst, r/piracy Edit: the pirates bay is also quite a fun place to poke around
Thank you, kind stranger
I have pirated Photoshop twice now. I have absolutely no regrets.
Had all the features I needed back in 2016! Absolutely hate CC. Bloated crap. The only way I don’t lose my mind is to use their portfolio site builder. It’s not half bad. But watch them turn that into a secondary product.
Yeah, this 100%. They're such an industry standard, but they basically bar newcomers from learning their software with the price.
Seeds. There are patents that prevent the collection of seeds.
and those are dumb. Just pirate the seeds. The birds do it every day and you don't see wild jailbirds do you? (Edit, punctuation)
This guy believes birds are real..
Yes, but its worth noting that a lot of those patented plants are hybrids, so collected seeds generally won't give you the same results as the ones bought from their manufacturer.
A car. They always asked if I would pirate a car and my answer was always yes, I would pirate a car.
Anything that you actually need to work/study but can't comfortably afford. Whether it is software, literature or whatever.
NFTs
It'll never not be funny to screenshot nfts
Adobe software always
Cars.
You wouldn't download a car!
You don’t know me
I will never understand what they were thinking with this ad. Like, I already pirate movies, music, books... OF COURSE I would download a car
But you wouldn’t download the gas for it would you? I mean you aren’t a total monster right?!
Of course not. It's electric.
You wouldn't pirate the music for your anti piracy ad
The movie?
Ka chow
Music by artists that are long dead… or even pirate any music you want BUT at least buy some merchandise, a concert ticket or an album. It’s better to steal an artists’ entire discography but purchase one of their albums than use streaming services.
artists barely make money from streaming anyway, merch and concerts is basically how they make money
Also, any 'compilation' albums that are comprised of catalogue music. Usually the artist isn't getting anything at all out of those.
Butts, with the informed consent of the owner.
I’m coming for that booty
“Are you enriching your beer?!”
At this point most streaming stuff, there’s so many different platforms you can’t really keep track of your favourite shows at this point, without going broke. Also sports, paying to watch your team nowadays on what used to be on regular antena TV, it’s a bunch of bullshit, specially when you can’t see away games.
We subscribe to a few different streaming services and I still end up torrenting a lot of what we want to watch because it is easier than finding where it is available. Also, at least amazon has this annoying feature that even if something is not available with prime video, it will show up when you search and when you click on it to watch, you are then told that you need to sign up for some other level of prime to view it.
I hate when I google ‘where can I watch x’. Oh it’s available on Hulu with a subscription. Okay I have that let me just open Hulu. Nope! Need that showtime add-on we tricked yo ass!
Spanish ships after the piracy act of 1698
Weird Al's song: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGM8PT1eAvY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGM8PT1eAvY)
Kinda hyped about the movie, not gonna lie. Daniel Radcliffe had been killing it acting in some "weird" movies.
Any game by EA.
Downside: now you're playing an EA game.
Including all of the dlc and microtransactions.
I mean even if you pirate their latest games with dlc and all that stuff it ain't gonna be really worth it anyways just waste of space cause them and Ubisoft really forgot how to make fun games
Especially The Sims
The Sims 2 isn't even available for digital download anymore. The only way to play it legally is to track down all the physical disks on ebay which is a pain and the money doesn't even go to EA anyway. Every time someone asks me where to get it, I say just pirate it
Games that are taken off platforms (no longer buyable).
Research papers, Food
Not many people are aware that researchers do not get anything from people paying to access their research
Worse, researchers sometimes have to pay a ridiculous amount of money for their papers to be published.
At this point, I'm more interested in how one pirates *food*. Do you just mean, like swiping it, all Jean Valjean and stuff, or do you mean the much more horrendous crime of copyright infringement, like calling your homemade egg-and-sausage English-muffin breakfast sandwich a "McMuffin" out loud.
You wouldn’t download a sandwich.
You're right but not for ethical reasons. I wouldn't only because I don't know how. If I could download a sandwich, I wouldn't have to leave my computer to eat
Microsoft Office
I had a perfectly legal copy of Microsoft Office 2019, but I got it through downloading. I had the product key for it still. Then I had computer issues and had to reset it, which got rid of Microsoft Office 2019. I tried to get it reinstalled, but every time I tried to, it kept insisting I pay for Microsoft Office 365 subscription service. What was my solution? Download a pirated version of Microsoft office 2019 because my legal copy was not allowed to be installed because they insist I pay for the stupid subscription fee for Microsoft Office 365.
Anything that is priced far above fair value. It's literally the only way to counter act the price gouging of streaming services. Piracy almost died when Netflix first started because believe it or not people are willing to pay fair value. But as prices began to grow and streaming services started to monopolized content, piracy is now becoming popular again. In a capitalist society where companies are free to set whatever price they want and consumers are forced to pay. Piracy is the only means consumers have to fight back.
Yeah. Back then Netflix had almost everything so it was an easy choice. Now I need to Google search which streaming service has this particular movie then determine if it is available in my country followed by which streaming platform it is on. Oh no it's on HBO Max and I don't have access to it here. I may as well pirate it at top notch quality to my Plex server and create my own streaming library for convenience.
Abandonware games. If I can't legally pay the publisher/developer for their product because they've removed it from purchase, then I'm sorry but pirating becomes okay in my eyes. Especially since buying the product used doesn't give money to the publisher either. And can often run into the hundreds of dollars for popular titles like the Silent Hill franchise. I wish publisher's would start re-releasing their old titles or partner with rom makers to host them online. I WANT to pay you guys, but damn if you don't make it impossible sometimes. (Especially Nintendo...)
Everything. Sharing is caring.
Banned episodes. Where else can I watch it?
Content not available in your country. Like, if you give me a chance to pay for it, sure, I will. But if you don’t even let me do that, then I’ll just take it.
Textbooks, academic books and research papers. Scumbag publishers are no better than big pharma; heartless a\*holes burdening the already debt-ridden student population with their ridiculous pricing.
Video games that are no longer sold by the publisher
You can’t be a victim if you won’t even sell the damn thing.
Anything Disney makes. I refuse to pay for any media from that corrupt supercorporation. Suck it, Mickey.
I downloaded a car
Anything that I wouldn't have bought otherwise.
EVERYTHING! HACK THE PLANET!!!
[Pirates.](https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/letter_of_marque)
Idk about "ok" but I've come to realize that with every big company having their own streaming service, I will not pay for any of them. I have my own streaming service (Plex) and that shit had a one-time fee.
I think the more critical question is "What isnt okay to pirate?"
Small publisher content Fuck Disney I'll pirate the fuck out of them But I don't have the heart to pirate dropout.tv shows or rulebooks for small ttrpg publishers
Anything you can get away with.
I will steal the moon.
movies made by big companies. I'm sure warner bros and shit suffer tremendously when i pirate one of their movies once a year or so. to be fair, i worked hard for it fair and square - bypassing the porn ads on those illegal websites is hard work.
Growing up it was just normal to get movies that way, but recently, after reading a bit about some movies, I lost any empathy regarding not financing the disastrous horror stories gathered from actors, vfx studios, artists, on set staff and how they are treated by producers. I'm not financing that. I know it's a demanding industry and everybody wants a piece of it, but let's be real: if it took 2 more weeks of shooting instead of doing those 16hrs rushes or 6 days work weeks for no valid reason, we wouldn't know, but that's what they do. BTW that's how Reacher was shot. 6 days a week over 3 months. It's not tolerable.
It is hard work. Ad comes up an you have choose which of five X’s is the real one. Choose wrong and… well, now you have a virus.
Disney movies and tv shows. Everyone who worked on them is paid up front, so you're just putting money into an evil company. Remember kids: it's not stealing if it's from a multi billion dollar corporation!