Ask HN: Do You Pirate Software? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do You Pirate Software?

5 pointse2d65ca3eaefa496 comments

I was saddened to see that in the last week TorrentFreak has reported both the (relatively minor) conviction of five private tracker owners in Denmark [1] at roughly the same time as the US authorities blocked z-library [2] and Google's newfound rule as censor becomes more apparent in France [3].

I've always pirated software. I've always paid for software as well -- sometimes more than two decades after I first came to pirate it, because that was when I was in a position to pay for it -- but the fact is that the marginal cost of making more software is very close to zero and I prefer to directly support its makers if I can rather than dealing with app stores or similar. I should stress that I really do buy software and other media items. I just prefer to give the cash to the "right" organization for the "right" price.

Am I alone? I worry that the "scene" is dying down a bit and that what used to be a more vibrant community has become quite literally a bit of a target for the authorities. Stories like this make me worry about my (south american) seedboxes, for example.

[1] https://torrentfreak.com/movie-piracy-conviction-for-torrent-site-co-founder-five-down-two-to-go-221107/

[2] https://torrentfreak.com/u-s-authorities-seize-z-library-domain-names-221104/ or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33460970 from 3 days ago

[3] https://torrentfreak.com/google-removes-hundreds-of-domains-to-aid-french-sports-piracy-crackdown-221102/

> Do You Pirate Software?

Not for a good 25-30 years so so. With so much open-source software available, I have had no reason to pirate commercial stuff anymore.

Yes, I do pirate.

I don't pirate utility software much. Most of what I need to do I can pretty reliably do with free software or with the cheap licenses I managed to pick here and there. Some of the free software I'm using is already the best in class like ffmpeg.

What I do pirate a lot is video games. There are couple of reasons:

1. Purchasing power. My purchasing power is roughly 4-5x less than the one in the western countries. I feel like this pricing is unfair. It's like someone would ask a US citizen to pay 250$ for a new game. Sure, I can wait for a sale, but at the same time there's no real reason why I can't just pirate the game, play it now and buy it when I feel the price is right.

2. Technical issues. Lots of games are released in a state where tons of stuff is broken. After buying several games with issues like these I decided that it's better to just pirate and check if the game works properly rather than buy and go through the refund process.

3. Quality issues. I've played games where it was clear that the scope of what was supposed to be included was going to be a lot bigger. Or games with an "open world" that is empty and there's nothing to do in it. Or game that abruptly ends after 4 hours despite the 60$ price tag. Or games that require tons of day one patching and are borderline unplayable for the first month or two. There are tons of issues like this in video games nowadays and I'm not going to pay for a subpar product if I can avoid it.

4. Lack of demos. It used to be common to be able to try a small section of the game before buying and I am not going to give this up just because game companies want to save some money.

5. Release date. If I want to try some old game then most of the time the only sane option is to pirate. There are sites like GoG that sell old games but this comes back to the #2 where some of the GoG releases would still not work despite supposedly being patched. GoG is also known for selling publicly released cracks so I'm not exactly sure what I'm paying for here.

6. Convenience. I don't have a CD/DVD drive anymore, but I have lots of games that are on these discs. I can just download what I need and achieve the same result instead of fiddling with physical media.

Similar to pwg, I have not borrowed software for upwards of 30 years. There are great open source and free alternatives to most commercial software intended for personal use.

I could envision one day that people may need to borrow movies and/or music if and when the streaming services revert back to the cable-tv models from the days of yore and/or if streaming services start taking away content people have paid for from their purchased catalogue and/or if too many movies or songs get cancelled.

I haven't done that for 20 years now. When I was a teenager I didn't have the money. But nowadays I have money, and most software I use nowadays is for work so it wouldn't make sense, and I find the process of pirating and dealing with potential malware to be too cumbersome. Back then €50 was a lot of money: I'd have to save for a year! Today, not so much.

No. I’m a member of the best paid group _ON EARTH_, so I make sure people working on the software I use can put food on the table.

Never mind the fact the incredible savings time wise not having to hunt for serialz.

havent checked for too long but are private trackers still thriving?

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