I see no difference. Takes time and effort to write the standard book on electronics and also takes time and effort to produce the new scifi tv series. Both are (different) jobs but I don’t think there is a difference if I pirate one or the other.

Immoral piracy is the killing of the crew during the hijacking of a ship. There is no moral dilemma in downloading anything.

Educational piracy is even more justified. Knowledge should never be paywalled.

Entertainment companies are morally bankrupt because of how much they take from the people actually doing work to give to CEOs. I don’t care if people get that content for free since nearly none of the revenue will go towards the creators. But they are at least somewhat reimbursing the labor that goes into the content.

The academic journals do not do any work whatsoever and charge absolutely absurd prices for access. They get free peer review from the community, they certainly don’t write any of the content. It is a moral imperative to prevent them from profiting off of other people’s work. Hope they lose all their ill-gotten gains.

When I was poor, I pirated a lot of games, played them and then spread the word.
I can say and do believe I helped sales and increasing popularity.

It’s not just a pat on the back. My recommendations had others play games they’d never even heard of and in turn recommended them to others.

Of course, now that I can afford some games and no longer play them at launch, I just stick to “Grab them on a sale! It’s worth it at a smaller price!”

I think pirating educational materials is less morally bad than pirating entertainment.

College textbooks, for example, are insanely expensive. I once paid like $300 for a single chemistry book. I never made that mistake again. Not because I pirated; I just started buying used or past editions. It’s not like chemistry for a 100 level class is cutting edge stuff. It’s the same ideas and knowledge we’ve had for decades or a hundred or hundreds of years. It’s all public knowledge at this point.

But you may need the book to do readings and assignments. So if you can’t afford the book, even used or past editions, then it makes sense to turn to piracy. I would sometimes grab the library reference copy of a textbook and just go crazy with a copy machine. That might technically still be piracy.

Entertainment, on the other hand, isn’t really required at all. So to me, that’s worse.

That all said, 99% of the stuff I’ve pirated is entertainment. My immorality is only bounded by the size of my SSDs!

I believe that information and knowledge should be free anyways (at least in a perfect world), because that leads to the betterment of society. Also if you are able to use the knowledge you learn from the things you pirate I think you’ll be able to come back and support those things that got you to where you are.

I just label entertainment as a form culture and avoid the dichotomy altogether!

Why entertainment is a luxury, knowledge and education is basically what human civilization is built upon and should be free. Of course the reality is that people need money in the current system we live in and we have to reward those somehow who dedicates their time and efforts to education.

So I’ve arrived to a conundrum… Because I think morally it’s more acceptable to pirate educational content (imho), but I’m also more likely to pay the educators, as it is a very important job. Of course this does not apply to when someone just gatekeeps knowledge because of greed, it’s very similar to charity fraud in my book

When knowledge is deliberately gated by large entities and the author would give it away for free (scientific papers) is a no-brainer for me. Or when a course requires specific textbooks that costs hundreds of dollars.

It’s all food for the mind. And The Jesus had some very compelling views on the morality of copy/pasting food until everybody was fed. CC0

If i paid for every required college textbook I would be broke. I’m already broke now, but that’s a different story.

I never buy any of the content but I do enjoy consuming content thus from a utilitarianistic point of view, piracy is a moral choice for me. Joking aside, if you can pay for things without a strong financial burden, you should pay.

I don’t really see an issue either way. I think we all try to justify piracy in our own ways, and ultimately, people either take a black and white stance or some shade of grey.

In my personal opinion, I try not to pirate things from small creators. When I do pirate, I usually end up supporting them in some other way, shape, or form.

Educational material I think should be free or very cheap. Education should be available to everyone regardless of their social or economic status. Those textbooks that those publishing companies charge hundreds of dollars for are a prime example. The companies are leeches.

Anyone should be able to download anything for free, in an ideal world. We don’t live in that world, so I download what I need/want, and pay the creators if I can afford it, in order of how high quality the content was.

That said, I don’t pirate applications, simply because I don’t trust running the code from a random source on my computer. There are FOSS alternatives for all productivity software (except for DAWs, and REAPER has a free ‘trial’), games I generally buy on sale, except for Geometry Dash for Android, which I downloaded the apk for since 1) it’s Android, which is apparently more secure than Linux, and 2) It seemed to have removed from the Google Play Store, or Aurora, or something, and I’d already bought the Steam and iOS versions of the game.