Well, my friend, he’s kinda poor he can’t afford some books and some streaming services, so he pirates. He pirate books, audiobook and videos and other stuff. Sometimes he buys books he likes a lot out of loyalty to the author (yeah, I don’t understand it either), he likes to read physical books, but yeah, if he hates the author or just wants to skim through it, he will download the book.
He usually doesn’t like to pirate from small companies or professors who are trying to make a living by selling books, but from millionaires & plenty of mega corps which already have loads of money, he feels like it’s the right move to pirate
Also, have you ever noticed that you have felt that the value of a product has decreased just because you didn’t pay for it, thus you are less interested to read it? i.e., had you paid for the book, you would have more likely read that book.
He says he will buy stuff when his time is more valuable than money, let’s all hope that day is soon.
What are your piracy habits?
I can afford to buy or subscribe to services but at this point streaming is just more annoying than pirating. With pirating I can use my favorite player (mpv), maximize video quality (high quality blu-ray rips), watch offline, no bugs or buffering, instant seeking et.c. As for games I might pirate a game before buying it but usually I just buy it since it’s convenient (unless it has intrusive DRM).
Even for 1080p media, playing locally with advanced denoising and upscaling to 4k is so nice, and of course just not having to deal with all the streaming caveats.
For games pirating it for performance testing is useful before you know you’ll fully commit to it, although Steam let’s you play for up to 2 hours and still get a refund, a lot of games will require you to play more of it to make that decision (looking at you, Starfield… I’m glad I didn’t buy that one).
I agree with holding off on Starfield. Bethesda games are usually instant buys for me but this time I’ll probably wait years before buying it. My love for Bethesda games is all about exploration and for some reason they replaced handcrafted story-filled landscapes with procedural generated ones? Hopefully modders make some cool content that is worth exploring in the future :)
There’s even some things you can do with a self-hosted media server that you just can’t easily do with sreaaming services. For example, Jellyfin has a group sync feature where multiple users can join a group and when someone plays something, it plays for everyone. It works great for watching shows with friends remotely. I think Amazon Prime video has something like this but none of the others IIRC.