eevee

Nah, I pirate movies so I can have something on while I eat. I don't post about them.

THE PHOTOSHOP THING 👏

there's no way adobe isn't very aware of people pirating the shit out of them, and they might as well not care because studios pay them way more than individual consumers.

all they need is for people to know how to use their software and get hired into studios that buy licenses for them, it doesn't matter if they all pirated individually. they may not have your money, but they very much have industry presence

I think I agree but I also want to be snarky and say "then I would simply not participate in culture "

and then theres the other side of the coin where piracy is the only option. this is especially a prevalent issue with video games, seeing how a good chunk of older titles simply do not have any way to be purchased anywhere anymore. ea and ubisoft come to mind, as well as various publishers that made their own little one hit wonder and dropped from the face of the earth.

"piracy as praxis" always felt to me like people falling fur teh corporate lie thaf pirated copies are losf sales, meowf

This has me once again thinking about Star Trek VI

counterpoint: i choose to not judge others based on what sort of media they consume. if i tell someone who wants to watch a disney movie to not watch it and find a "better" alternative, they will probably ignore me. but i can still point them to a torrent or DDL site, convince them not to give disney or whatever a single unit of currency, and make an actual tangible impact

additionally: the reason people think the other stuff is shit, is because they're alienated from labor and do not realize just how much money (or labor, as they're interchangable) is in the things they enjoy

you see it a lot with kickstarter/youtubers who eventually realize they're doing 9 people worth of work but can't actually afford not to

This is only tangentially relevant but just sayin': means.tv

I defo feel there's a lot of parallels with other “Leftist” actions. Some people think activism is burning a police cruiser, and yeah, sometimes it is, but in the grand scope of things, less dramatic acts do more to sustain a cause, because, well, it can't be all war all the time, right?

Not everyone is a frontline soldier, and not everywhere is a battlefield. Not every thought or motivation has to be derived from hate and aggression.

It's really easy for some people to lose sight of what and who exactly we are fighting for, and what actually matters. Stealing shit seems a lot more glamourous and status-building than simply enjoying what our own communities have to offer, just like burning cop cars can seem like the more visibly useful act than holding a potluck for locals.

hey guys what's going on in this thread

3/10 post. It's wordy, condescending, and speaking to an audience that doesn't really exist.

i haven’t encountered the other side of this discussion before so i needed a moment to calibrate and follow this. admittedly this isn’t something i’ve thought about in such direct terms before, but it still generated some thoughts, which i hope make some sense.

i think i struggle with this from the perspective of participation in industry, like, when it comes to stuff that inevitably has an outstanding impact on its medium, and so becomes functionally necessary to experience and understand in order to participate in that industry.

Nintendo does a whole lot of Not Great Stuff, but they are still a common source of industry trends, and they also will not be going away any time soon. referring to something being “like BotW” is practically part of the base language of the discussion of video games now, i would think. does simply understanding such vernacular contribute to making something “part of culture” implicitly? i guess i would think not, but i could understand disagreeing.

perhaps using piracy to participate in the shared experience, but coming up with alternative language to when expressing the ideas and concepts therein that doesn’t refer to the source material specifically, strikes a good balance between practical and ideological? developing that language takes some effort though, and i suspect it’s usually inherently more difficult to be understood when using alternative language in this way, so it’s not without added friction. i suppose working against cultural grain necessitates such friction however.

i’m also thinking about this in the context of art and entertainment primarily. there’s a whole other bag of beans when it comes to stuff like software that people use to accomplish necessary tasks.

wanna go to da drive through at mcdonalds and order a large soda

see now im just thinking about the social complexities that is sci-hub, and why it has to exist

people are having very strong reactions to the post so id like to add an addendum: there is a difference between "being a leftist" and "doing a leftist thing", (and not everything you do has to be "doing leftism" in order to "be a leftist"). the point of eevee's post is not "doing piracy makes you Not Be a Leftist" but rather "doing piracy is Not Doing Leftism".

(also there's maybe some bad things that come along with conceiving one's self as "being leftist" vs instead viewing oneself as "doing leftism" but thats farther outside the scope of the post's topic)

the thing about raising prices reminded me of a tweet i saw pointing out that "carbon taxes are bad because the increased cost burden will be passed on to the consumer" and "shoplifting is good because it hurts companies and not the consumer" cannot both be true

there's a flavor of it that especially bugs the shit out of me that boils down to "$Thing is morally objectionable, so I'll just download it for free!"

As if the latter somehow cancels out the former. Even aside all the posturing like ... why do you WANT to consume the morally objectionable thing?

Not only that but so badly you're willing to commit an illegal act just to acquire it?

What is the purpose here?

This post is spot on. People act like "Suck the oxygen out of the room for discussion of any media other than that spawned from our grotesque content pipe" isn't a core part of the business plan of the Netflix, Xbox Gamepass, and Spotify's of the world. I don't know why some would think that deliberately aiding that plan is somehow striking a blow against the corporate world.

You can't believe the (correct) assumption that piracy is mostly a victimless crime, while also thinking you're stabbing adobe in the heart by pirating photoshop instead of using literally any other piece of software. These are mutually exclusive worldviews.

i've maintained for a while that spherical piracy in a vacuum (ie. the plain act of circumventing monetary paywalls to gain access to a product) is a morally neutral act when applied to large corporations. you heading over to FreeTVDownloadNoVirus.mobi to download all 18 seasons of Star Wars: The Story of Glup Shitto is only losing disney like $140 (aussie pricing for disney+ because i'm Upside Down) annually. oh no. the media megaconglomerate is losing 3 pineapples every year from you. you really stuck it to the man with that one.

"but what if i get all of my friends to pirate too" nope. piracy doesn't scale like that. if everyone pirated, then suddenly disney would have actually have an economic incentive to crack down real hard on piracy and make it not just difficult, but impossible (almost certainly making it harder to watch their shit through their own sanctioned channels in the process). and you bet your ass disney has the strings to pull to make that happen. you're not getting any "moral win" out of this. sure, you aren't causing any harm - disney is more than able to survive without your regular subscription fees, they would be a lot angrier about piracy if they weren't - but you're not making anything better either. neutral act.

personally, i think the most useful aspect of piracy is in what's pretty much a side effect of it - enabling archival/preservation. pirates are meticulous little bastards - they are very particular about capturing media in exactly the form it was distributed in. and that's cool - we know full well that we can't rely on streaming services to keep a show on there forever, there's plenty of stories out there about netflix or hbo or whatever just yoinking a show from their platforms and now oops there's no legal way to watch that show now (specific examples are evading me but i definitely recall stories like these going around). but the pirates? they've got it. and they've make sure they've captured it as close as is physically possible to it's original quality. that's where the value is - for me at least, i'll admit to being a little bit of a datahoarder. like it or not, these corporations are producing things that go on to become pretty deeply ingrained in popular culture, and given it's not, like, representative of harmful/regressive values (i don't think there's much positive value in preserving like, recordings of dave chapelle's "comedy" shows for example), i think it'd be nice if we could make sure that things we enjoy stay around.

also nice (oh god damnit how do you put images in comments i wanted to put a screenshot of the comments count saying "69 comments" here)

hey. im starting to feel like this is tumblr 2.0! OP i am so sorry

touches the ground in the comment section something bad happened here
Idk what's going on but "piracy is fine but it isn't praxis" shouldn't be this hot and spicy of a take lol

I don't really understand this. I've tried using free software for years. I used GIMP for the longest time because I didn't feel comfortable pirating Photoshop. It still hasn't improved or gotten better since I started using it. I don't speak of what editing software I use or what programs I use. I don't really like movies or television, so I can't comment on that.

I appreciate the sentiment of getting people to try out free things, but the reality is; no one will put up with less good stuff, with some small glimmer of hope that the software they are using will get better with more people using it (which doesn't happen generally, no matter how much I've tried getting people to use free alternatives). I tried LMMS which is a free DAW similar to FL Studio, and it's nowhere near as convenient and accessible to me, and I wasn't able to accomplish even 1/10th what I could do in FL Studio (and I've barely watched how to videos on it). I'm not really willing to give up a drastic lack of productivity to try to support freeware stuff, because it just means I won't use it, and I will just give up because I'm not accomplishing things fast enough.

Is this a me problem? Absolutely. I won't deny it. Though I think this is a problem with many, and it's just something we have to deal with under Capitalism. I certainly don't like that giant corporations have an unfair advantage over programs being offered without profit. They make so much money that they can invest it and make a product that offers a lot more features that are just easier to understand. I tried to make an infinitely scrolling hex grid in GIMP, and it wasn't possible the way I wanted to do it, but with Photoshop I did it easily with some trial and error. The tutorial I saw for GIMP was years old, then I looked to see if there's a more recent video; it was the exact same method, so nothing has changed. I've never really spoken about what program I use until now. This is only mere examples.

The only real exception to this is DaVinci Resolve, but even it isn't entirely free, and some stuff I needed to do required external plugins that others might not understand how to use.

If this is about pirating shitty people's art, then i'd advize not plugging either every single time. Keep your stupid consumption to yourself, but also realize consuming media alone doesn't magically change the world.

I mean, if they want to see that art without plugging or paying, i have yet to see a negative outcome. Nobody is entitled to have anyone see their art. If you need its income to survive tho, i absolutely think fundraisers and such are underrated. Why the fuck do people deprecate e-begging? Just don't donate you little baby.

Completely correct post. That's all.

people making angry comments in here should instead put that effort into using a very long fishing pole to hoist the service weapon out of a cop's holster undetected so that the cop can't use it

unrelated, and definitely has been observed before, but it's really annoying that the flamewar on this post is the most engaging thing going on on this entire website right now :(

i think this is an excellent post. It opened me up to a perspective that i had no idea to even look for. This will inform me going forward. Thanks!

i do not disagree with the foundation of this post, but in order to get to it, my brain has to decode through the language and tone you use to communicate it. it immediately comes off as hostile and antipathetic. and while there's nothing wrong with that in and of itself, when someone—in high readability bold—says to a theoretical reader as the first or second thing they process:

when you pirate corporate media, you are still a corporate shill

that YOU. are a corporate shill, that YOU. are just fucking over everyone else. it sets a very apparent tone to the skimmer that is immediately antagonistic. this distorts one's ability to process the underlying information and logic of the work, and makes it more difficult to *snap* get. the latent judgement of character gets in the way and it breeds response and chaos and fire, as it has.

it is a vibe i have not yet seen on cohost, it's something that has evidently stirred up the pot with others, because they too are not familiar with this tone on here. where twitter has a condescending talk-down voice out of the way space-constraints seem to affect how people write there, it is not expected for someone to come off in a similarly provoking manner on a platform that gives way to long-form writing and (usually) an aire of clarity over the spurring of others' emotionality.

it reminds me of a hybrid image, where you take one pictures's global features and another pictures's local features and put them together, and it looks like the first thing from far away and the second thing from up close. skimming this post makes me see the global features of condescending language (at random "corporate shill" "you gonna show them who's boss by pirating it?" «"i don't want to pay for things".») but when you really go through and read it more thoroughly, the context shifts into something less rilesome.

basically tl;dr you probably could have rewritten this to have less chunks that could be interpreted as "rude-postings" and it's reads like you kinda wanted some stirring of someone's pot, even if it ended up affecting an audience you didn't intend. in the comments you seem to have been kinda hostile too so i hope this doesn't itself come off the wrong way ykyk.

again i agree with most of your points, but the delivery very evidently gets in the way.

yeah basically. also speaking from experience, niche art IS better than corp stuff, because it doesn't have to water itself down so that it can sell to as many people as possible and break even on its bloated development/marketing costs, sooo

I have my own compunctions with piracy as praxis, but not in terms of holding the pirates responsible for what major corporations like Disney or Nintendo do in response to them (why not just hold Disney or Nintendo responsible?). While I agree with the basic premise that piracy itself serves to add value to a product that its right holder can claim for itself later, my overall focus shifts toward the piracy community itself, and how its decentralized nature represents one of its chief weaknesses.

Unfortunately, this is where my thought process turns to total mush, so to give you the vaguest idea of what that thought process is: whenever a major publisher threatens piracy in some way - Nintendo taking down a ROM site, those book publishers going after the Internet Archive - the retro game community will chime in to warn itself of the necessity of piracy to keep said games from being lost or otherwise marginalized. Necessary work, but beyond lacking any plan beyond just pirating whatever (is anybody making sure we're preserving Word Image Sound Play?), the main problem is the community isn't fully reckoning with its own role in making these works desirable to the companies issuing those takedowns. While we put a lot of work into maintaining interest in old works that would otherwise be lost and forgotten, because we do so outside existing copyright law, the rights holders - who aren't synonymous with the people who made the game, and may not add any new value beyond claiming the property for themselves - have free reign to harvest all the value we've imparted into a given game.

You could have made this point without sounding like an angry twitter person who blames all their peers.

"why am I still hearing about this post" 147 comments holy fucking bingle what

Damn yall

absolutely hilarious to see someone whose consistent multi-year multi-website brand is a character from one of the most profitable multimedia properties on the planet to call someone a "corporate shill"

This is incredibly validating to my previously held bias against those people who say they need photoshop. Like sure, they're pirating it, so they aren't giving adobe money, but I would still feel a little annoyed that they're insisting on this thing being as essential as a public utility when I personally haven't used any adobe product for any project for the last 10-ish years.

"disney is an evil company, so it's actually ethical to keep consuming their stuff as long as you don't pay for it!"

This paragraph just gave me this image in my head. It's the year 21XX and it's cyberpunk as fuck up in here. In Disney Springs Resort & Labor Village™ GP-0E, hundreds of digital billboards, holograms, and Remote Autonomous Family Friendly Behavioral Drones™ with The Mouse's logo plastered on them fill the skyline. The camera pans down to the depths of the alleys.

A dozen scrappy looking non-FastPass-owning 20-somethings in hoodies file through the rusty door of an abandoned waste-treatment facility. The last revolutionary in line takes a long, cautious scan of the skies, before sealing them inside. In the dark, they gather around their makeshift table and pull back their hoods. The group expectantly looks to one of their members.

"It was hell getting my hands on this one, guys. But ..."

He tosses a flashdrive out, it clatters on the sheet metal.

"Encanto. Four."

hey I keep writing up lengthy frankly somewhat self involved responses about criticism-as-praxis, fanfiction-as-praxis, and so on, then deleting them because I look at the giant nightmare reply thread and think to myself "my lord this seems exhausting enough already", so instead I'm just gonna say hey! this post made me think! I liked that its tone challenged me to reflect on where my positions on politics may have become complacent and unexamined! thanks for a good reading experience 👍

i do actively want adobe to die and become abandonware