I think the total cost for me would’ve probably been like $5000 (USD) at least. Like at least 100 movies. 150 TV shows, 50 games.
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.
Outdated image, these days we just remote into the FBI office, no FBI jacket needed.
What is the point of being in the FBI if you’re not going to wear the jacket?
Don’t you ever get cold and lonely without the jacket?
That’s for next week’s episode when I have to go out in the field to do the investigation.
(Investigating the donut shop near the crime scene, that is 🍩)
Outdated image, everything goes through palantir now
nice try Interpol!
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.
$0. I would not have any it if I didn’t pirate it. I was never going to spend any money.
this is exactly why their numbers for ‘lost revenue’ is a load of shit… Most of us would be the same. If we couldn’t pirate, we just wouldn’t watch their shit.
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 …
Let us not admit to possible crimes on teh Internet. :-)
Nah fuck it. I yaRrr’ed the pirates of the caribbean movies, fuck the mouse.
Participating in this community is practically admission already.
There are millions of us in the US, tens of millions of us worldwide. Are they gonna sue/jail us all?
This was tricky, but I estimate about $3.50
That’s one lazy loch ness monsta.
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.
I see no problem with learning to use some expensive software by pirating it only to then get a job using that software (paid with a corporate license). Before many companies had “education editions” of software, that was how you learned.
I think for books its easier to attribute credit to one person compared to like dozens of actors and extra crew to make a city scene in the movie look populated, or like multiple members of a band. Books are just one person responsible for all of it. If the author is good you support them. Where as, sometimes a movie is good, but then one of those producers/script-writers/actors turns out rotten with bad politics (like bigotry) then your support is kinda of goes towards their royalties and fame. With one person, its much easier to research their politics to support them, and simultaneouly easier to organize a boycott writers for their bigotry.
Also 90% of the people who work on movies don’t usually get royalties. They’ve already been paid for their work, who cares if the production company CEO gets a few extta bucks?
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.
This right here is what really grinds my gears. When companies own an IP, refuse to do anything on it, and then engage in litigation when someone makes a fan-based project against that IP, or someone redistributes their IP that they’re no longer selling.
Either ride the horse or leave the stable.
Does this include media I grabbed but literally never opened or looked at?
If a tree falls in a forest, but nobody heard or saw it, did really fall?
If you pirated media, but never saw it, did you really pirate it?
Looks like today is your cake day! Happy cake day, but… Is the cake real or not?
The cake is a lie!
The cake is a pie?
There’s a lot of stuff that you can’t even buy now.
About -5000, where can I collect, FBI?
Collect at your local FBI office, of course.
Don’t worry its very safe, there are some very skilled agents right at the lobby to protect the the money… from the bad guys of course. All you have to do is just walk to the receptionist and ask for it. Looking forward to meeting you! 😉
Thanks! Let me pack my gun and some weed for the trip, I’ll be there in a jiffy.
