IninewCrow

A dollar at a time … I’m willing to give or donate a dollar, two dollars or even five at a time … if we all did that with a popular creator, they’d easily be able to reach a lot of money in a short time.

I donate to wikipedia, Open Source Software projects I use, firefox, thunderbird, ubuntu (although I am getting skeptical about this one) and other linux projects … on top of that I send funds to creators, app developers and lemmy instances and other fediverse projects and those people who maintain the software, servers and communities in the fediverse

In all, I probably spend about three or four hundred dollars a year or more to these projects … but I know that for the majority of them, the money is going to people that need it … not to people who just want to add to their wealth after never contributing anything of value other than their ownership of someone else’s work.

And if we all did this as users across the board … these small content creators would have more than enough to sustain themselves and continue creating and maintaining these projects

I’m all for piracy but I still try to spend money where it morally makes sense to me.

I’ll buy, rent or subscribe to content from actual creators or artists or developers if I know I am supporting their livelihoods or careers.

I’ll pirate content if I decide for myself that the content has already paid for the livelihoods of the creators or workers who produced the material and now it’s only the title holders and corporate interests that are profiting from the ownership and entitlement of controlling the content for commercial reasons only. For me this is mostly just big budget movies, old films and commercially produced music.

To me, anything that’s already paid to help the original artist or creators should be made public. Locking it away and making people pay for the privilege of the content just to make more profit for someone else is piracy itself. This is especially true for films and music that are so old that the original artists and creators and owners are multi millionaires or just no longer exist.

I may be wrong but that is my own personal view of collecting digital content.

The inverse should also be true … if businesses want to know about their customers … customers should also know every detail about the business they are dealing with.

When we pirate its called breaking the law

When they pirate, it’s just another normal business day

And in case you don’t know what they pirate … they pirate profits, raid workers unions, scavenge privacy rights and invade your personal space

That really grinds my gears

I remember a few years ago going on an international flight. I had Spotify premium and I spent a few hours sorting and downloading playlists and podcasts that I wanted to listen to on an eight hour flight. Tested, retested and everything worked fine.

Got on the plane, fifteen minutes in turn on my device to play some music … NOTHING WORKED … all the downloaded files I had set for offline were unusable. I couldn’t believe it.

My next flights were like yours … just downloada bunch of stuff and play them freely without headaches.

Even with videos I enjoy from channels I really like, I block all ads … and if they have a 30 second spot in their video to plug some product or service, I fast forward it to skip their personalized ad spot.

I don’t want ads … if I want to give you money, I’ll give you money because I like you or the things you do or the things you make … not because of some dumb product that you think makes you look good.

If I like a channel or personality or artist or singer or someone just makes me laugh … I send a dollar, a fiver or even a ten depending on how good it was.

If everyone did that, no one who makes a video would care about ads.

They should just attach a turbine to Karl Marx’s coffin … his spinning could probably supply enough power for all of Western Europe.

You can’t lose something you never had

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Greed … it’s the cause of all these issues. Greed on the part of the corporations and industries that run these services and own all this content.

If they just tempered their greed, lowered their costs, paid themselves less, shared profits with those who actually deserve it and made all of it more affordable and even cheap for customers … no one would think of piracy and we would all just feel comfortable paying for services and content knowing that the money we did spend was being shared fairly.

Instead when we all know that the profits they make just go towards corporate greed, giving away money to shareholders who do nothing and give little to no money to the actual content creators while artificially inflating costs on all of us just to squeeze more out of everyone … those of us at the bottom really don’t mind pirating content because we know that the only people we are stealing from are the greedy idiots that instead feel that it’s normal for them to steal from us.

Everyone pirates everyone else … it’s a matter of economics … either we pirate them … or they pirate us. If we all live with an understanding, we learn to live in balance without pirating one another.

Right now the they’re tilting the balance against us … which is why so many feel obligated to raise the Jolly Roger once again.