I feel piracy for demo purposes is fully justified if you buy it after you like it. People always say vote with your wallet but it's more like gambling with your wallet if you don't get to see and touch the product before you make the purchase. Giving proper demos should be more common with digital media.
Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.
Rules • Full Version
1. Posts must be related to the discussion of digital piracy
2. Don't request invites, trade, sell, or self-promote
3. Don't request or link to specific pirated titles, including DMs
4. Don't submit low-quality posts, be entitled, or harass others
Loot, Pillage, & Plunder
💰 Please help cover server costs.
On a related note, I'm very glad I pirated Starfield.
I'm thinking that I might buy it once we have creation kit access and mods that add story and flesh out the game a la Fusion City Rising and companion mods for Fallout 4
At that point I'd rather pirate the game and donate to mod developers who are putting endless hours of unpaid time into free mods.
Demos used to be a lot more common. It used to be the norm for most games. Now it's extraordinary.
Indie devs seem to be bringing them back. Played quite a few demos recently. Hopefully the trend continues.
Imo “vote with your wallet” is more about companies/brands that have proven to do shitty games, as in “don’t buy any more games/dlcs/microtransactions from them”.
Vote with your wallet regards any sort of purchase. By giving money to someone you are giving them the most encouragement possible to continue doing what they're doing. If you purchase something that you end up not liking, they will still receive your initial vote loud and clear. The gaming industry especially has shown us that companies will happily take both the money and the negative review and say 'thank you'.
To be honest, that would make me pay for the plugin.
Unfathomably based
I had a colleague who would buy legal versions of software and then shelve them while using pirated cracks because he hated the EULAs.
It is also an honorable course of action. Developer gets paid for their work, you use quality service with convenience.
Although it's not very honorable for developers to intentially create a worse product for people who pay, just to try to prevent a small number of pirated copies to work (which likely won't actually prevent anything).
This is what I do with movies. I still, to this day, do not understand what possible purpose studios have for including 3 minutes of copyright warnings and other bullshit ahead of movies that people paid for. Pirates don’t see any of that shit, morons, and the people who are ripping these films already are ignoring the warnings. What the hell?
You would think that in 40+ years of being completely ineffective against pirates and only hurting paying customers they would have learned that that time and money could be better spent elsewhere, but I guess that would imply that the rich are rich because they make good decisions, instead of just being born with good options
Ooh, I usually say luck and timing is what the rich had, but I like "being born with good options" too. Makes more sense since even with luck and timing, still need the means.
Pirates a movie, includes copyright warning on the pirated copy, include a note to say they're including it in good spirit of the producers wishes
There's a FOSS companion app for AirPods on Android and some features are "locked" until you press "Activate" and choose "I've spent all of my money on AirPods" as a payment method.
Smart developers, the make you feel good about pirating and then purchasing when you decide it suits your needs.
Some people just get it.
You catch more bees with honey than vinegar. Smart developers treat all their users well and then they get the same treatment in return. It's the smartest way to do things.
Big brain move, getting you to acknowledge that you’re pirating for when the lawsuit comes.
More people need to accept that piracy helps sales in the end, not take sales.
If ppl like it enough to pirate it, ppl will also like it enough to buy it. That's the rule of thumb imo.
The caveat is that it has to be easy for people to find it and buy it without jumping through hoops. If you gotta jump through hoops just to buy it, you might as well jump through hoops and get it for free.
I am not a lawyer, but... This does not prove you're pirating the software. It's informing the customer (who, as far as they may be aware, obtained the key in a totally legit manner) that the company thinks the key to be a pirated key (of which, it might not actually be, but, rather identified as such by the company or software in error). It is definitely designed to illicit some form of guilt if you did in-fact pirate the software (which is between you and your conscience), but it is not proof that you pirated it. That said, I totally back what this company is doing!
Remember when blizzard let you install a spawn copy on a friends computer so you could play together?
Also some DS games had similar where only one copy of the cartridge was needed to play with friends. Think one was mariokart DS
Would be a very popular move to letting people play together without everyone needing to be nickel and dimed(i feel like thats also a dated phrase now that i read it. Old gamers remember! Young gamers please help us find cool things, we are old and cant keep up!)
Back when Blizzard campaigns were so good you paid for the single-player while the online multiplayer was free.
It kinda reminds me how Reaper DAW lets people have a really long trial version that I used for ages and then eventually decided to buy it when I could afford it. It's been great.
Good on them.
I had a similiar experience with Mount and Blade warband, I pirated to try it, bought it after and when it didn't work the folks at TaleWorlds helped me out fix the issue. Absolute lads.
Now i wanna buy that piece of Software, so i k ow somebody can Pirate it and does not feel Bad about it.
As an adult, I pay for winrar purely because it helped me so much for free as a kid (especially pirating other software).
This is fantastic. I’ve no use for this software, but I would absolutely purchase it if I did.
For me sometimes its enough if i can get a plugin demo with FULL functionality and without some sort of beep or white noise every x seconds, to buy a plugin if i like it after tests. And for more then a few days. But this is nice too
I can't find the video, but I remember someone at Ableton said they pretty much had the same view of Live piracy. If someone pirates it, they weren't willing to spend the money on it, but perhaps they will be willing to in the future.
For creative software like that, the vast majority of people getting it pirated are amateurs, and if they get good enough, they'll eventually be paying back.
Same thing with photoshop, if I hadn't pirated it, I NEVER would have developed the skill set required to use it effectively. Piracy is the company getting thousands of future potential customers for free. How many thousands of people pirated it and went on to work professionally and pay for it? Adobe wouldn't be near what it is without piracy.
I still remember Zoë Keating commenting on torrents of her album on the pirate bay back in the day. Free marketing tbh.
"STEAL IT. Steal away. Steal and steal and steal some more and give it to all your friends." - Trent Reznor, after record labels jacked up NIN album prices. Then later clarified the best quality rips were on Oink (rip 😢)
I just bought a license just because
More devs should be this understanding of piracy. So should companies in general.
Asking nicely is a lot better than hitting. More flies with honey than with vinegar.
Similar attitude by the HoI devs caused me to buy HoI2 and every new release after that.
True Pianos is a really solid piano VST by the way. It's been years since I used it, but it was really good back when I was dabbling with this stuff.
If you donate, dev doesn't have to pay taxes. If you buy, dev becomes more popular because one more sale.
Advice?
If you donate to the devs, of course they still have to pay taxes. That's still income.
do both
Just because you give money to someone or something it doesn't make it a charitable organization that doesn't get taxed.