Yuri Connoisseur
I still pirate my music, using YouTube music revanced, but the main reason I do it is because I find it to expensive for how often I use it. I don’t use it that often, mainly just when cooking dinner, if there was a way for me to use YouTube music for $5 a month, I would probably pay for it.
Also for me it has to be YouTube music, as alot of the songs I listen to aren’t on other platforms, (song covers, and remixes).
Yes, I pirate, and I pirate alot. Games, books, shows, software, I do it all. But I also buy stuff, mainly games, occasionally books. I’m am not in a position where I have the sort of money to buy everything I want.
My piracy philosophy is mainly to almost always pirate it first. If I like the game enough, I’ll buy the game when I have the money. I have done this alot, A Hat in Time, Hollow Knight, and recently Baldurs Gate 3.
With books it’s alot more difficult, as they tend to be alot more expensive than games, especially for the series I read. (Manga and Light Novels). As there will fairly often be around 30$ per volume where I live, and close to 12 volumes total. And that’s if you can even buy them in the country, or if they have even been translated officially, which if they haven’t, then piracy is your only choice to read it.
Regarding shows, I basically only watch Anime, and the only way to really stream Anime is crunchyroll, which region locks alot of the shows, gives hardly any money back to the actual creators of the shows, then uses the money they get to make awful shows. Pirating anime is realistically the only way to enjoy it hassle free.
For software, everything is license based now, I’m willing to do one off purchases at a reasonable price (something like steam wallpaper engine), but I hate recurring fees. I pirate software like photoshop.
Ultimately piracy isn’t really as bad as people tend to think it is, it’s largely just people enjoying the stuff that they would never have been able to pay to enjoy anyway. It’s especially good for people with less disposable income in helping them find where they can spend the money on things they enjoy, such as with me with the games I mentioned earlier.
Alot of the larger instances have user donations set up so that the servers can be maintained, this is how lemmy.world works
Honestly, if I was a God, I would create the universe, then just watch how it unfolds, why would I interfere to save what is the equivalent of ants to me?