Poll: Do People Pirate Because it's Free? Or is There Something More to it?

[AlphaOmega]

I only "Pirate" tv series but that is due to not wanting to be behind something silly like 6months to a year; I buy the boxset as soon as it comes out though.
Sometimes I pirate a game I want to buy to try if my pc can run it, and if it does ill buy it.

So in short I use piracy to get "Demo's" or to avoid having to wait a long time to watch a series.

 

[Estolcles]

I pirate movies and Music. Only those two things. (Ok, and porn, but that's not piracy, that's just called 99% of the internet.)
With the movies, most of the time I download them to see if it's something I'm gonna like.

Sure, someone might say it's wrong because I'm ripping off theaters and movie studios. Well, if I like the movie, I end up buying the DVD, so the studio still gets it's money, and if I hate it, I discard it. As for theaters... well... I worked for Regal. They fucked me over on my paychecks, gave me health issues, and caused extreme trauma to my brain on many instances, so I could give two shits less about them, and no speech or anything, including "You're stealing food from starving ethiopians because the theaters give them donations" won't help you. (Plus I'd just say tell the Ethiopians how to fish, and move 'em to the ocean. Lazy fucks.)

As for music... well... the only acts I really listen to are bands who are already multimillionaires who have more than enough money as is to buy all those starving ethiopians, and turn them into nice leather couches. Or, they're dead and only the music studio is getting money from their music. (God Rest Dimebag Darrell.) Or the bands already release it themselves for free. Either which way, the music industry hasn't made a damn thing I've wanted to listen to in about a decade, so why should I give them the money so they can give that money to another Ke$ha, or Jonas Brothers, or some other godforsaken bullshit band that's gonna make diarrhea run screaming from my anus by the time they hit the third chord of the song OR I've named the 50 songs their background "music" they've "sampled" from by the time the 30 second mark hits. (I'm looking at you, rap artists.)

Then there's Metallica... which I just like the idea that every song I download pisses Lars Ulrich off just that much more. What a prick.

 

[aaron552]

You could have checked out a lot of that online, on say youtube, or what have you to see what other people thought. But you didn't, for whatever reason. It was free to pirate and then decide if it was worth buying or not.

Most of the music videos (apart from the ones uploaded by the actual pubishers, obviously) on youtube are uploaded illegally.

The vast majority (>80%) of the (legal) music and DVDs I own, I own because of piracy, in one form or another. Whether I downloaded it myself or watched/listened to a copy a friend had downloaded or watched/listened to an illegally-uploaded video on youtube.

It wasn't always like this (with regard to music, anyway) as I bought many of my CDs because I'd heard the artist on last.fm. But then last.fm started charging for users outside the US.

It's not that it's free, necessarily, either; it's the convenience. A huge library of music and video that I can just dip into if I see something that interests me.

When it come to paying for music, I have standards: CD quality or it's not worth my money. That means losslessly compressed digital downloads (I've seen hardly any legal lossless downloads and none of any artists I like) or CDs. When I buy music, it's to keep forever, so I want it to be as good quality as it can reasonably be. If the CD isn't available where I am, then I'll pirate it.

My thought process goes like this: If the publishers aren't making it possible for me to buy it, they're not losing anything by me pirating it.

 

[Cmwissy]

Whenever my err *cough* friends *cough* pirate it's for old games that can't be found anywhere else, and if they are I err I mean my friends usually live in the wrong area to buy the games.

 

[Tipsy Giant]

I Pirate because media distributors are too afraid to embrace new technology, i watch programs legally when they are on iPlayer of 4od but if it isn't my convenience is top of my priorities. if they want my money they better make it easier

 

[Kukakkau]

Mainly cause it's for free really

Problem is copyright laws make very little sense and ties itself in knots. Under the same logic you can buy a cake (CD) seperate it into parts (song files) but you can't give the bits to others

 

[Woodsey]

DIGITAL MEDIA SHOULDN'T HAVE A PRICE TAG?!

Show me the 10 people that clicked that and I'll show you 10 fucking morons.

And it's because it's free. Yes, people say it's because they need to demo it first, and I'm sure that some of the people that say that actually mean it. In Shamus Young's article on piracy I'm pretty sure he said that the statistics showed that that wasn't the case for most people.

It's still costing people their jobs, and it's having an impact on me - you know, the legitimate buyer. So honestly I couldn't give a flying shit what excuses pirates use.

 

[TerribleAssassin]

Usually it's impossible to get what I pirate otherwise. Not my fault they don't make physical copies anymore.

Or banned in your residence?



OT: I only do VERY rarely if it's for a song that I can't get my hands on anywhere.

 

[Abedeus]

Last game I pirated was Assassin's Creed 2. Not because I didn't want to BUY it. Not because it was expensive, or I didn't have cash. It's just that I won't allow to be f'ed in the ass by developers who force me to go online for a single player game.

Seriously, I'm downloading a TV series, a patch, a driver and I want to play a single-player game, because I have stuck broadband. Or Internet is down and I can't play online. OR JUST WANT TO PLAY THE GAME WITHOUT WORRYING ABOUT INTERNET. So, I won't buy games like these, sorry.

 

[Tipsy Giant]

You pirate BOOKS!? That puts you just above panhandler on the cheap fuck scale. I've never heard of pirating books. How low can you go? Honestly. It's called a library if you want free books. At least the author still makes money when his books are in the library. Pirating books... Honestly. It takes a lot to be that incompetent at life.

I don't pirate anymore because while stealing might be necessary sometimes to survive, stealing from artists is just dishonourable. And there's no one else you could be stealing from when you pirate. That movie you downloaded in an hour took someone millions of dollars and thousands of hours to make. That song took hours upon hours of practice to produce. That book took years of experience.

I don't understand your logic here. books are free through the library, and books are free to pirate. what's the difference? the library doesn't profit off of me renting the book; their budgets are determined by population size, not the rate at which the community rents them. Also, it's called an amazon kindle. you can't exactly rent books for those.

Also of note are game rentals - the makers see no money from that, it's basically piracy masquerading behind a veneer of legality because you've spent some money. That is bullshit. It's still the same thing as getting the game ANY other way than buying it new at full price, so some people need to get off their high horses and get a sniff of reality.

Also, what's wrong about DLing TV? I have a TV license and Virgin TV, so it's not like I'm just a leech or anything. There's only 4 shows that I want to watch, and none of those seem to be shown in the UK, so fuck the programmers that I'm paying for my useless, commercial-ridden subscriptions, I'm going to download my TV and watch it when I want, how I want.

Fucking Eh mate, the problem is that everything is so diluted nowadays that if you wanna watch something good you are gonna download it, if they want my ad money stream it online so i can watch it and ignore the ads like i do on normal tv

 

[Valkyrie101]

I pirate stuff (mainly music), because it's free. I don't have enough to money to buy all of the music that I want; it's that simple. I don't really see any other good reasons to do it.

 

[Tipsy Giant]

I pirate stuff (mainly music), because it's free. I don't have enough to money to buy all of the music that I want; it's that simple. I don't really see any other good reasons to do it.

so pirating (bad) has lead to you expanding your understanding of an art form (good) but it has cost record company executives money (who fucking cares)

THUMBS UP DUDE

 

[Megacherv]

Piracy has three main reasons.

- Reason #1, the main one as far as i'm concerned: You don't have to pay, thus it's really useful for cheap jerks who don't care about developers and for those who don't have the money but still want a new game every now and then.

- Reason #2: Convinience. You don't even have to get off your ass in order to pirate - it's all on screen. You wouldn't believe how much in the desire to pirate can be attributed to sloth. But luckily, digital distribution services (Steam, iTunes, etcetera) possess this benefit too.

- Reason #3: No Export For You. Do you think it's easy to find Earthbound in the United States? Do you think it's easy to find Larry Niven's novels or the aforementioned Scott Pilgrim in Russia and neighboring countries? No it's not. And don't even get me started on Affrica, Southeast Asia or South America. Actually importing those things is much harder than torrenting them, not to mention prohibitively expensive. Those acts of piracy are not really lost sales though, as the artists couldn't distribute their stuff in those countries in the first place.

On your reason 3, Brazil's gaming industry is largely done with piracy. Games and consoles there are so bloody expensive due to really high taxes, that it's common to get modified consoles to pay for games at their normal prices. I think an Xbox 360 there costs the equivalent of around US$700, and a PS3 is over US$1000 (disclaimer, they may be in GBP instead, which means they may cost even more)

 

[automatron]

I pirate, but not because I'm too cheap to pay.
I do it because it's easier than buying the stuff.
I'm at a boarding school, and anything I buy would have to be on the weekends or through the internet, and they take too long

 

[teh_Canape]

Down here in Argentina pirating is almost culturally accepted.

We have very little support from gaming companies, and we're expected to pay four times the standard since our coin is highly devalued (plus a rather bullshity 50% import tax on anything related to technology). So yeah, few people are willing to pay $240+ for a game down here, and it has reached the point where I can walk into stores and see folks selling pirated games as a pretty normal activity.

That said, many people down here actually support Steam since digital distribution allows us to bypass importing and it's much more cost acceptable due to their promotions and whatnot.

this here is true, there are even SHOPS that sell pirated shit

I mean, come on, look at these prices and tell me they dont redirect your attention to pirate bay torrents

*argentinian bro-fist, darkye*

 

[Lord Monocle Von Banworthy]

I mostly pirate because I'm an expat and I don't want to pay the extortionate prices of imported English-language stuff here.

No, wait. That's not true. I still pirated everything I could when I lived in my home country. I don't like it. I wish I could go back and buy all the mp3s I previously pirated, but I can't afford it.

I have trouble convincing myself that I stole something when I torrent say, an episode of a network television show. They broadcast it for free in the first place. If I had tivoed it myself and skipped the commercials it wouldn't be theft, but because someone else did it for me and removed the commercials and I got it from him it's suddenly theft? Nyet, tovarische.

I pirate PSP and DS games. Or I did up until about a year ago when I threw both machines in a drawer. I liked them so much more when I only had a few games but had to pay for them. I remember thinking a while ago when I had downloaded The Force Unleashed for PSP that if I had bought it I'd have definitely put forth the effort to finish it, but since it was free I just kind of lost interest and never finished. So is Freud right to say that my guilt keeps me from playing, or is Festinger right to say that the game mustn't be very good if the only thing that would have kept me playing it was cognitive dissonance?

Books, well, again whether I had paid or not the book wasn't going to be funding the publisher. I wait and comb used bookstores and get the book used. I'm paying SOMEBODY for it, but not the content creator, so the argument that my expenditure leads to future content quality for everybody is dubious. I guess the same is true of console games. I don't buy new, so the creators aren't getting paid.

I only pirate because it's free and extremely convenient. I have issues with it. I like myself less because I do it. If I were rich enough and all the content I wanted were streamed (and honestly just about all of it is between amazon and itunes) I'd definitely become a 100% legal consumer of digital media.

 

[Ironic Pirate]

People pirate for many reasons. Service, daring, price...

There are too many reasons to name. I don't see how pissing off the RIAA or others is worth it, so I don't.

Awesome avatar, BTW. It's the first to give me a good laugh in a while.

...what about mine? You're making me cry...

*Ahem* Anyway, some people are probably idealistic about it, some just like free shit. And then there's people who don't have access in the product in their country, due to censorship or lack of a market for it...

 

[hecticpicnic]

pirate's ARE why the record industry is falling ,and cds are so expensive and they're the reason many indie movies are only on the internet for pay to download sevice,
i don't mind pirating though its all my brother does ,i just don't like it when people pay for nothing at all and store everything on there terabyte hard drive's.
Its acceptible if you don't have money or can't get the movie/game/music its what gets alot of stuff known.
I only download games i can't get or that are over charged(fallout 1&2) or music just to see what its like and then if i like it buy the vinyl/CD (because mp3 is SHIT).The mentallity of everyone is that they will still make money ,most target audience are middle/upper middle class ,butt those are the people who download everything, (making more expensive for the people who can't afford it)and i don't like the idea of me buying what ever because i wan't to support who ever made this weird though provoking low-budget masterpiece when somepeople just say "why buy it you can get it on the internet for free"
there should be some pirate code like:"i will only steal from the rich and outofprint stuf blady blady bla"

p.s. thats why i like bluray and vinyl(bluray is now nearly the same price as dvd )
because its great quality you can't get on the internet and im not even gonna go into manga scan's

 

[JordanMillward_1]

The only things I pirate are out of print books, mainly because I'm not gonna pay some guy on Amazon £200 for an RPG or a novel with only a vague hope of it having all it's pages and not have coffee spilt on it (I used to do that, but when I paid for some OoP Black Library Warhammer/40k books and they were in awful condition, that stopped any chance of me doing it again).

Plus, if I can't get the money to the developers, I don't see why I should pay some guy 10x the price he paid for it. If it's just that item that is OoP, and the company that made it is still up and running, I'll usually then just buy something else from them even if I don't really want it, so that they get some of my money in the end.