Damn, I miss when games came with manuals… the anticipation when reading them while coming back home from the store…

torrenting/P2P was the first mass scale digital piracy method.

IRC? Napster? Edonkey? Emule? Kademlia?

And, hell, before that there was that guy in class who for five bucks would burn you a CD with any game you wanted, which he probably got off usenet…

And of course for music there was the old double deck cassette copier…

(Personally the first software crack I remember was dismantling Monkey Island’s “dial a pirate” wheel so I could photocopy it to share with friends after copying the diskettes…)

Last I checked it still works.

…

If you’re not in a hurry, that is.

Neil Gaiman (yeah, yeah, I know, but death of the author and all that) also had a good video on how piracy actually improved his books sales.

Thing is, you’ll talk to people about the shows and movies you liked. You’ll recommend them. You’ll discuss them online. Maybe just upvote a post talking about them, make it more visible.

And someone who doesn’t pirate will see that, and pay to watch it. (And, in turn, also promote it like you did.)

If the product is good enough (and if people are pirating it it probably is), piracy is free publicity.

And if it’s not good enough, people won’t be pirating it anyway.

So, given that you wouldn’t have paid for it anyway, it works out that piracy provides a net benefit for the producers… and for society as a whole, since it incentivises them to make their products good enough to attract pirates, thus raising the average quality of entertainment.

EDIT: also, for the same reason they should be giving their product for free to reaction channels and even paying them (like game companies — Nintendon’t excluded — already do with YouTube reviewers), since it’s cheaper and more effective than normal advertising.

Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.

— Benito Mussolini (you know, the fascist dictator who practically invented the term “fascism”).

For anyone who was doubting that fascism is, indeed, an extension of capitalism.