Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

nice try Interpol!

$0. I would not have any it if I didn't pirate it. I was never going to spend any money.

I'd be fucked ....

Currently around 70TB .. over 2k movies, 1.8k TV shows (63.000+ episodes) and around 66.000 tracks by over 900 artists ...

This kind of thinking is what the mpaa and others want pirating framed as. Very very little of what's pirated would have been paid for at all had it not been available. I've paid to see sequels for movies that have pirated and have bought books based on series I've downloaded that I never would have bothered to explore if I had to buy them originally.

Nice try, FBI

I owe my entire life to piracy.

I learned all I know on pirated software, and all the jobs that I've ever held are entirely attributable to it.

Did I shaft the software vendors I pirated the software of? Absolutely. But! I'm also very well paid and I pay a lot of taxes thanks to my ill-gotten skills. So overall, I contributed to society as a whole orders of magnitude more than I stole from the individual software vendors.

Of course, I recognize that this sort of logic is self-serving and leaves the software vendors I shafted without any money. But... just sayin'. There's more than one face to this coin.

As for media - music, movies and such, I've almost never purchased any. I bought a few LPs as a kid before my parents bought me a cassette player (and more importantly, recorder). After that, I never ever paid a single dime for any media I've ever consumed. Never. And I still don't.

I make no apology for this: it's theft pure and simple. The only weak justification I can offer is that if I tried to purchase music or movies, it would be inconvenient to procure, DRM'ed, force shit I don't want to watch down my throat, like those stupid unskippable FBI warnings on DVDs, and the pirated versions of mp3s and movies are much more user-friendly and resistant to time and deprecation. But at the end of the day, I fully admit that I'm a shameless freeloader.

The only thing I pay for religiously is books. No particular reason why I respect writers more than musicians or film directors... It's just like that. I want writers to get paid.

Nice try FBI.

This is tough to answer, because a lot of pirated stuff is literally priceless, i.e., can't be bought at all.

I'd be happy to pay for the recent Ace Combat 5 and 6 upscaled ports, but they were only available briefly with preorders for AC7 on consoles I don't have. They haven't been sold outside of that brief window several years ago. Even if you tracked down unopened copies from 2019 and bought them from third parties, the license codes they contained expired long ago.

Fortunately, the Ace Combat community has put a lot work into making emulation work. The older games are playable, just not in a way you can pay money for.

Does this include media I grabbed but literally never opened or looked at?

There's a lot of stuff that you can't even buy now.

Nice try, glowie

After a very intensive calculations session, I come up with at least 7$.

About -5000, where can I collect, FBI?

Pay what? A physical copy? A digital license for streaming on a platform? A digital rental? A month of streaming service that includes it? Taking free access and public libraries (like public broadcasting libraries), temporary or time-limited into account? There's way too much variance to make any reasonable assessment on this.

To get an idea of price variance, even without monthly services, which make individual consumption cheaper still, let's look at the value of digital products on Steam.

Comparing my Steam account value calculated by SteamDB, the "lowest value" is 23% of the "value today". Taking into account that prices reduce significantly over time, you could put it much lower.

How do you expect people to calculate "if you had to pay for every item"?

Infinite money. Capital wants infinite money for their imaginary property in perpetuity. Otherwise they'll get their state to put you in a cage.

How do you even start to quantify something like a TV show? Without piracy would you have had subscription services, seen it free when it came on local TV and/or bought a box set of it? Similar situations exist for other media too, which "full price" are we talking about?

There are games like Divinity Original Sin 2 that were so good I bought them after I finished them. So.. hard to tell.

Probably not that much. I ended up buying most of the games I pirated anyway. For me, it was because of sheer poverty.

These days, I don't care enough about games to bother anymore.

Or, I own the media already, and just want an easy-ready version that I can video edit without having to fuss over decoders and crap.

I've pirated books that are so rare their used copies cost hundreds of euros. Also there are the English academic publications, which have insane prices even by default, and boy do I love hoarding them. In general, I've pirated so much I have no idea how I'd even go about estimating the theoretical total cost.

OTOH I've also recently been thinking about how much money I have spent on legally obtaining media, going to concerts and film screenings and plays and exhibitions and everything else... Should be solidly in the four-digit area.

Jfc, I can't even calculate.

Music, if we say 10 bucks a CD, at least 10k. Probably closer to 20k, and maybe more because I haven't actually counted in years because I didn't see the point in trying to keep up. However, I just went and looked at the folder on my nas and it has 1k+ albums on it, and that's way less than is on my main drive on my media PC. So even the 20k estimate is a lot lower than what's actually there. Likely closer to the $50k mark if my memory is right. I tend to grab whole albums rather than individual tracks only, and I'm prone to grabbing an entire discography when I discover a new band. My music collection is around 2tb total, I know that without looking.

Movies, even at the same price, it would be around the 8k mark somewhere, though they aren't all in one place, so I cant be certain. There's a little over 1k files on the nas, but that's only the ones that everyone wanted available on there.

Books, I'm fucked. Call it 5 bucks for a cheap paperback, and I'm close to 10k, if not over. Hard to be sure because I do have duplicates in multiple formats. I've whittled down to only "borrowing" epub files and converting on my own if someone borrows an ebook from me and wants a different format, but I've never gone through and deleted mobis and whatnot. But it's around 3k files on my boox reader, plus more on my nas drive that I really only keep because I like having access to some reference materials but don't use them often enough to justify keeping them on devices. So 15k there, at that price.

I just checked because I was curious. Almost 18k files of ebooks. That, however, does include classics that I only read occasionally, copies in multiple formats, stuff that isn't for me (kid, wife, etc), and probably some stuff that I read once and never will again, but didn't delete. So, over 50,000 bucks at 5 bucks each.

Comics, that's easier because a scanned version doesn't really have a monetary value at all, and most of my collection is of OOP stuff. So, depending on how you look at what a price should be, it's $0, maybe 600 bucks at $1 each, or you'd have to track cover prices on all of it, and I ain't doing that lol.

Tbh, I can't think of the last time I pirated a game. I just don't game that much on my desktop any more, and I know I haven't in the 10 odd years I've had that specific hard drive.

If I tried to factor in stuff that was higher priced at some point (and CDs used to be pretty expensive), numbers would go up.

Shit. Even if I wiped out the stuff I have physical copies of, it would still be in the 100k range I think.

By this point I would have to have Luigi'd about three CEOs to be able to pay all the stuff via collecting the contracts.

Hi FBI. I will just say 5000 seems crazy low though, especially if you're assuming a movie is $20-$30 and a game is like $10-$80. Dunno how you'd calculate tv shows but dvd/bluray seasons/box sets can get real expensive fast.

Does a WoW subscription count? I've played on private servers for a looooong time, that alone would've been some 20+ months of sub.

It's tricky for me to estimate because the majority of my piracy happened around 2004-14, so lots of stuff I don't remember, plus some of the games I pirated back then I ended up buying later on at a discount (Jazz Jackrabbit, SupCom, UT2004, X3TC). I still don't own a legal copy of Age of Empires 2, so you can add that one to my debt.

Oh, that reminds me, if I add the many, many, MANY emulated roms to that list, boy, that'll be a lot of debt. Some 500 games times ~40 dollars average, that's 20k.

There are also the many anime episodes that simply didn't exist as available for purchase, so "at original price" I guess it'd be zero.

Depends. If we take from when I was a kid? Probably something in the hundreds of thousands or even in the millions. I pirated pretty much everything because I lived in a very small town with no electronics shop so I couldn't even buy games.

However, in the last 8 years or so? I find that I rarely pirate games anymore. Bundles, steam sales and refunds allow me to buy without worrying about liking the game.

Music is also something I don't pirate anymore. I'm not one needing thousands of tracks, but rather a small and select collection. So I occasionally buy from bandcamp or other services so I can keep the music I want in my jellyfin server.

Films and shows are a different thing tho. At home whave netflix, so for most stuff we go there, but if something's not there, I'll pirate it. So... idk but... some hundreds? I'm not a fan of movies and most of the stuff I watch (which is not a lot) is on netflix.

How would you calculate tv shows that have being broadcasted

On music alone... I have 774 albums on my library, of which I probably legit own like 20-30. At a conservative 10€ per album, that'd be around 7500€ on music. I also have 81 series, of which some of them are dropout.tv, which I'm legit paying for, so let's say 75 series that I pirate. I have no idea of the real cost, but let's say each series is 100€ in bluray. That's another 7500€. I also have 202 movies, of which I own some, but not in bluray, so let's assume I'd have to buy all of them. At, let's say, 20€/movie, that's another 4000€.

So, in total I'd say I have around 19000€ on pirated content. There's no way I could pay for all of it lol, but I also haven't watched/listened to all of it, so I wouldn't have bought it even if I could.

Edit: oh and I forgot about videogames. But I don't pirate many of those lately anyway, since steam is so convenient, and I also have a big catalogue of free games from Epic. But I did pirate maaaany in the past. When I was a kid I would rent them and then download a "nocd" crack lol, those were the days.

I rarely actually pirate anything. The only time I pirate is when I'm otherwise forced to go through that specific company to do the things I want due to monopoly shit.

Used to pirate windows before switching to Linux (I still give people I know helpful tips on the process though, not everybody can make the switch yet). Used to pirate MS office and a couple other pieces of software back when I had to use them for school. I would pirate substance painter if a Linux crack was available, but I haven't been able to find one and I can't get the windows version working, so I simply don't use that software. And as for shows and movies, that whole mess of subscriptions, yeah I don't watch pretty much any of it. I buy physical copies when possible and watch stuff with friends who have the services. I use bandcamp for most of my music, sometimes YouTube for discovering new stuff.

I will however keep up to date on all of the piracy methods because i will not be caught helpless by some shitty company who thinks it's found a way to corner me.

None I think. I paid for all my streaming services that had these movies and shows and then have sourced everything else through originals or sources that were rentable.

This is that whole issue with defining ownership with digital media. Movies were called the greatest financial invention of America because they only had to make a product once and could sell it forever.
With digital media and technology increases we now have a much easier time owning our own copies.

This is likely literally what NFTs hoped to fix to make set revenue of of each digital file and also why they failed because they are so easy to copy anyways.

So, none, or an infinite amount, depending on if you ask me or a business major.

Zero because I don't have to do anything.

A lot. Though it's hard to put a price on some things because they're software for discontinued products ( old game consoles, Amiga software, etcetera ) and aren't sold as they were, even if some of them are still sold for other platforms.

If I can't own it, I'm not buying it.

Hard to tell, guesstimate €1,500.

I really only download music, mostly individual songs. I use sites like himovies.to for movies, and then if I like something enough, I buy a DVD, if available.
And some few "mod apks", which yes, are a bit shady. I don't know how to do that myself, so I just run them through VirusTotal and hope for the best if it's all green (false negatives). Stuff like KineMaster because I am procrastinating to learn using Kdenlive, MLUSB Mounter and some games.

I haven't purchased any media or software (excl. donations) that doesn't come on a physical medium.

Depends, are we talking the highest retail price? Or clearance prices?

Let's take steam as an example, before steam existed I was a big pirate. Now that steam exists and it's so convenient I basically buy every game. But I only buy them after wish listing them and waiting until they get to like $5 or less. So I'm a bargain basement patient gamer.

For other things I'm the same way, so what would be the actual cost of a cheapskates pirate library? Flea market clearance DVD prices would be fair

I only pirate what is unavailable.

And things that are supposed to be bad, like the new Snow White movie, which made me still feel robbed.

I’m like in like 200$ maximum